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Cfte am&etst Books 
 
 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
THE 
 LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 BY 
 
 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 PRESIDENT OF AMHERST COLLEGE 
 
 BOSTON 
 MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
 
 1920 
 
<&& 
 
 
 COPYRIGHT- 1920 -BY 
 MARSHALL JONES COMPANY 
 
 THE-PIIMPTON-PRESS'NORWOOD'MASS'U^S'A 
 
 OCT -5 1920 
 
 ©CI.A597714 
 
 " \ 
 
To 
 
 E. F. and N. A. L. V. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 'HE title of this book was chosen by the managing 
 editor of the series to which it belongs. It is 
 appropriate, I think, that the title page of the 
 first of the Amherst Books should thus express the authority 
 of the Board and of the purpose by which the series is to 
 be dominated. Amherst College enters upon the publi- 
 cation of these books with very high hopes. It is willing 
 to set aside desires far more compelling than that of a 
 writer for his title, if thereby something may be attempted 
 in honor of the legend Terras Irradient. 
 
 The editor's justification of the title is that it indicates 
 accurately, as it does, the subject-matter of the book. 
 The writer, however, would have preferred another title. 
 He would have chosen the name "Making Minds," and that 
 largely because it invites misunderstanding. I am sure 
 the editor will reward the willing submission of the writer 
 by allowing him to use a few words in the Preface to indicate 
 the notion which he would have liked to express. 
 
 The book itself is a collection of papers and addresses 
 dealing with the liberal college. From cover to cover it 
 expresses the conviction that liberal study enriches and 
 strengthens the lives of individual men and of groups of 
 men. It is based upon the belief that for a man and for 
 his fellows it is well that he have a good mind, if possible 
 an excellent or even a distinguished mind. 
 
 But with respect to such a belief as this misunderstand- 
 ings flourish and abound. In general people have a peculiar 
 interest in the processes by which they themselves were 
 made. And the discussion of those processes and especially 
 the suggestion that they might have been better than they 
 were does not, for obvious reasons, conduce to calmness 
 of mood. Psychologically it is not hard to understand 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 why each man yearns to think his college best and hesi° 
 tates to agree that changes might make it better. For this 
 and for many other reasons men are not thinking thoughts 
 when they discuss the teaching process. They are rather 
 giving voice to affections, purposes, prejudices, desires; 
 and the terms which they employ vary in quite undis- 
 coverable ways with the emotional qualities which lie 
 behind them. 
 
 In such a field as this misunderstandings are sure to come. 
 With respect to them we may take either of two lines of 
 action. We may ignore them in the hope that they will 
 go away, or we may invite them to make themselves at 
 home with the hope that they will lose the hostile quality 
 of the alien. My own choice would be that of ready hos- 
 pitality. It is good to be as well and as quickly as possible 
 acquainted with the misunderstandings which may visit 
 you. Acquaintance tends toward understanding and for 
 misunderstandings there is no other cure. 
 
 If then the Editor will allow, I should like to present in 
 this short Preface three misunderstandings which regularly 
 call upon us. I should like also to devote the Introduction 
 to a genuine attempt at making their acquaintance. 
 
 If one says that the purpose of the liberal college is to 
 make minds, these misunderstandings or, shall I say, 
 objections immediately appear. Education, we shall be 
 told, should make not minds of men, but Men. And 
 again it will be said that it is nonsense to speak of making 
 minds or making men; such living things as these must 
 grow; they are not made. And finally we shall be told 
 that whether the process be one of minds or of men, be one 
 of growth or of manufacture, the college has little to do with 
 the achievement of the end; the college tends to take 
 itself too seriously; men learn to live by living and not by 
 spending four short years cut off from life by college walls 
 and college customs. 
 
 To consider these misunderstandings will be the chief 
 purpose of our Introduction. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Making Minds — An Introduction 3 
 
 Part I. The Determining Purpose 11 
 
 I. WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS NOT 13 
 
 II. WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 29 
 
 III. WHAT THE COLLEGE PREPARES FOR 5 1 
 
 IV. MAKING THE MIND OF A NATION 6l 
 
 Part II. The Participants in the Process .... 65 
 
 1. the college as critic 66 
 
 ii. the freedom of the college 84 
 
 iii. student activities in the college .... 97 
 
 Part III. Discussions in Educational Theory . . . 107 
 
 I. LOGIC IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM I08 
 
 II. IS MENTAL TRAINING A MYTH ? 1 16 
 
 Part IV. The Curriculum 134 
 
 I. A COURSE FOR FRESHMEN I35 
 
 II. A CURRICULUM FOR A LIBERAL COLLEGE . . . I38 
 
 III. A REORGANIZATION OF THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM . I49 
 
 A Final Word 164 
 
THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 MAKING MINDS — AN INTRODUCTION 
 
 INTRODUCTIONS are of necessity rather formal affairs 
 with some regard for rules and proprieties. Now there 
 is one rule with respect to the meeting of arguments 
 which may at least be mentioned as our misunderstanding 
 friends draw near. It is this, — a number of different 
 arguments may not properly oppose another argument 
 if they are opposed to each other. They have no right to 
 ask a common enemy to kill them off if they have within 
 themselves the possibility of mutual extermination. In 
 a word, arguments must settle their own differences before 
 they attempt to settle a common foe. One need not press 
 the point; it is sufficient to know that whether pressed or 
 not the principle is at work in the inevitable logic of the 
 situation. 
 
 I 
 
 The objection that the college should make Men rather 
 than Minds is the most aggressive and headstrong of our 
 opponents. Boys should be prepared for life, it says, 
 not for the reading of books or the spinning of theories. 
 Education should be practical; by it bodies should be 
 strengthened, friendships should be established, manners 
 should be acquired, spirits should be purified, apprecia- 
 tions should be enriched and directed, the will should be 
 fortified and inspired and subjugated, all the powers of body, 
 mind and soul should be so trained and correlated that from 
 them shall be made such a man as a man should be. 
 
 This argument is hard to meet because it very discourte- 
 
 3 
 
4 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 ously gives us at once the feeling of being not merely in 
 the wrong but quite disgracefully so. Without intending 
 it we seem to have said that bodies should not be strong 
 and that wills might just as well be weak, and that ap- 
 preciations are of no importance, and that the spirit of man 
 is a matter of no concern to us. Why do we seem to have 
 said this? It is because the phrase, "Not minds but Men" 
 seems to demand as its opposite "Not men but Minds. 
 But we had no intention of saying this. We did not ad- 
 vocate the making of minds for the sake of opposing the 
 making of men. We had rather supposed that the making 
 of minds was just a part of the making of men. In fact, 
 when we said "Making Minds" we meant "Making the 
 minds of Men." Let us then protest at once that we are 
 not hostile to the making of men; we are rather modestly 
 engaged in it and are meanwhile keeping an eye on the 
 third approaching objection which is waiting to jump at 
 us for taking too seriously our part in the process. 
 
 This demand that a teacher of physics, for example, 
 should make not minds but men is of the same general 
 value as would be the assertion that a farmer should grow 
 not wheat but men. What is the good of food stuffs, 
 one asks; are they not for the feeding, the nourishing of 
 men? And if they are, then why does not the farmer 
 proceed directly to the end, why waste his time in seed and 
 soil and all that care called agriculture; why not make men 
 at once; why throw one's hours away on crops? It is a 
 sordid soul that values crops above the men for whom 
 the crops exist. 
 
 One can imagine a farmer somewhat bewildered by such 
 an attack as this. And many a teacher is bewildered too. 
 Are men more important than food ? Yes, food is for men. 
 Are men more important than minds? Yes, minds are 
 for men. Does it then follow that the farmer should grow 
 men in his wheat fields, or that teachers of physics should 
 construct men in the laboratory rather than make pupils 
 wise in the realm of physics? 
 
MAKING MINDS 5 
 
 The trouble with the argument is that it is so true that 
 it cannot help becoming false if one dwells upon it. It is 
 the lazy fallacy which confuses ends and means. It is a 
 favorite fallacy of practical men in fields with which their 
 practice has not made them familiar. It is the fallacy of 
 those who say "Give us results" and who have no time to 
 inquire what results are wanted nor how they may be 
 gotten. It is also the fallacy of the sentimentalists who 
 opine that telling a boy to be a man will make him one 
 or that willing to be a man is all that one needs in the way 
 of training and study. 
 
 But now we must stop calling names and meet our guest 
 with proper decorum and respect. He comes suspecting that 
 we are hostile to him, that we oppose minds to his men. 
 We must try to make him see that this supposed hostility 
 is an illusion, a misunderstanding. How shall we do it? 
 
 First let us assure him that we know the limitations of 
 the mind and of its training. All the values of life, all 
 the things worth while in life are found in the feelings, 
 the emotions, the sentiments of men. And further, all the 
 ways of realizing these values lie in the realm of will, of 
 action. The mind, in the narrow sense, neither feels nor 
 acts, neither is value nor makes value. But on the other 
 hand the mind is the informing of the feelings and the 
 directing of the actions. It is the guide which makes feel- 
 ings delicate and true, which makes actions precise and suc- 
 cessful. The mind is not all of life but it is the intelligence 
 which directs life to the achievement of its ends. This is 
 what we mean when we say that intelligence is power — not 
 that it acts, but that it makes action successful. It is the 
 eye which sees the rapier's mark but not the hand which 
 it directs to grasp and thrust the weapon to the spot. 
 
 A second observation follows closely upon the first. We 
 see that four short years of teaching minds is only a little 
 part of human education. All that men are and do must 
 be developed and trained. And in the doing of this all 
 human institutions, all human experiences have a part. 
 
6 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 The home, the church, the school, playmates, friends, 
 climate, food, health, employers, servants, social relations 
 of every sort, all these are making men, making a man 
 for seventy years, making him until his day is done. Amidst 
 all this the special training of the college course is rather 
 a little thing. At any rate it is a very special thing, as 
 special and peculiar a thing as books are in the material 
 world, those collections of paper pages with ink-marks 
 on them, as special as words are among the actions of men 
 and nature, those sounds made by the human throat and 
 lips. In terms of quantity the college course is not a major 
 part of education. We count it some forty hours a week 
 for thirty to forty weeks in each of the four years from 
 seventeen or eighteen years of age to twenty-one or twenty- 
 two. Not all of one's education is acquired in these hours. 
 
 And now since we are speaking in the spirit of friendship 
 rather than of controversy, we must tell our inquiring guest 
 what we actually do along this line of his suggestion. There 
 are three aspects of our attitude of which he should approve. 
 
 First, we count upon the wider education which precedes 
 the college training and upon that which follows it. The 
 college experience we recognize as an episode, one of peculiar 
 value, and yet as following from earlier experience and as 
 leading into later living. In general we must send young 
 men back again into the society from which they came, 
 not as they were but better trained in mind for that society 
 than any other kind of living would have made them. 
 
 Second, we recognize that during these four years, the 
 life of the individual student and the social life of the com- 
 munity must be maintained, must be kept vigorous, fine, 
 and high in quality. A college must be a good place in 
 which to live as well as a good place in which to study. 
 For this reason we have our chapel and church, our fra- 
 ternity houses and dormitories, our athletic games and 
 other student activities, our friendships of pupils and 
 teachers each with his fellows and each with the members 
 of the other group. Taking them all in all. I doubt if 
 
MAKING MINDS 7 
 
 there are better communities in all our social scheme than 
 are our colleges. 
 
 And finally let us make one genuine concession in the 
 hope of friendly understanding. Let us admit that when 
 we speak of Making Minds the meaning which we give 
 to Mind is a very broad one. Judge us by our deeds and 
 you will see. Our course of study includes the careful 
 training of the body for three of the four years of residence, 
 our teaching of music, of drama and of literature seeks 
 to inspire as well as to inform the appreciations; (to many 
 of us it seems that other arts should make this contribution 
 greater than it is); the college discipline or lack of it in- 
 tends to bring the will to fairness and to strength of char- 
 acter; but more than all things else the teacher, teaching 
 his subject, captures his student for the kind of life he 
 thinks worth while; to go to college is to live in fellowship 
 with students and teachers; it is their personalities which 
 give its liberal meaning to the phrase "Making Minds. 
 
 11 
 
 Our second guest comes with the objection that "Mak- 
 ing" is not a term to apply to minds; "Minds," he says, 
 "are not made; they grow." What shall we answer? 
 There is no genuine difference here. Or rather, if there 
 is a difference, our critic is right. Only in a certain peculiar 
 sense may we speak of making minds. They are not made, 
 as if they were constructed, but they are made to grow — 
 made, by proper cultivation, to grow properly. 
 
 The objection to external or mechanical descriptions of 
 education is a thoroughly valid one. No interpretation 
 of teaching is more fallacious than that which regards the 
 teacher as giving learning or knowledge or wisdom to 
 the pupil, putting this desirable attribute into him. The 
 teacher may feel wisdom going out of him in the teaching 
 process, but, strictly speaking, he cannot be sure that the 
 pupil is taking it in. The relation of teacher and pupil 
 is always a somewhat mystical one. Learning is chiefly 
 
8 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 by imitation or by contagion. If a teacher is working 
 and is influential, pupils will learn to work; if a teacher is 
 trying to make others work, pupils will learn to do that too; 
 if a teacher loves wisdom wisely, pupils will love it as well. 
 
 And yet we must not let the principle of growth run 
 riot. A college is not a hot-house in which the whole 
 being with all its powers is to be forced into early flowering. 
 College teachers are men of special powers; they are quite 
 different in type from other men; they have very different 
 and very special lessons to impart. It is essential that 
 they do their special work because they can do it and others 
 cannot, and most of all because the opportunity for it is 
 very brief. The mere establishing of an "atmosphere" 
 for student growth is not enough. The "aromatic" theory 
 of education is almost as bad and certainly far more un- 
 wholesome than the mechanical one. A college is a place 
 where something is to happen and to happen definitely 
 because certain men know what they intend, and are de- 
 termined that what they intend shall be accomplished. 
 
 In this connection it may be noted that with respect 
 to the relation of learning to hTe there are three types of 
 able teachers. Of these three types, two should be kept 
 away from a college by every device which the art of man 
 can imagine. The third should be sought after as men of 
 old sought after the philosopher's stone or the secret of 
 perpetual youth, though one would hope with somewhat 
 more success. 
 
 First there are men who are strong among their fellows 
 but whose strength comes from sources other than abstract 
 knowledge. They are men who have built up power by 
 experience in practical affairs, by sentiment, by will, or in 
 any other way than by the use of books and other instru- 
 ments of study. 
 
 Second, there are men well versed in books, learned in 
 scholarship of certain sorts, masters of some special aspects 
 of a field of knowledge, who are yet negligible as men among 
 their fellows; no one feels them to be important. 
 
MAKING MINDS 9 
 
 Both these types of men the college should avoid when 
 choosing teachers — avoid them as a merchant would 
 shun the advertising of a competitor's wares. The college 
 is engaged in making men stronger and finer by means of 
 learning. It must not then take as its agents men who 
 achieve strength primarily in other ways, nor men who 
 have failed to achieve it in this way. As against these 
 the college teacher of the third type is a man who is power- 
 ful among his fellows but whose power springs from the 
 studying which he has done, from the learning which he 
 loves and is. If teachers are of this type we may let young 
 people grow in their presence with the assurance that they 
 will grow properly in the special way in which a college 
 seeks to make a student grow. 
 
 in 
 
 Our third objection has already had its say. In fact 
 we have been speaking for it or it for us as we have sought 
 to come to understanding with its fellows. 
 
 The college training is a limited, special thing. It 
 is not all of education, it is not even all the education 
 which one receives during the four years of its duration. 
 And yet it counts — counts heavily in making men, in 
 making groups of men. Out of the quiet little places where 
 men and boys assemble for study of human life and of the 
 world — out of those places has shone forth a light which 
 has illumined human life, which has made clearer the world 
 in which we live. These colleges are neither big nor strong 
 nor independent in external ways. They are like nervous 
 centres in an organism, — not very large in bulk, not self- 
 sufficient, not adequate for action in the world of things 
 and facts. And yet they are in charge of action, decide 
 what it shall be, and see that it is done. Men everywhere 
 are making human life, are making mankind to be a 
 stronger, finer thing than it has been. And in the doing 
 of that task, they choose to set aside some quiet groups 
 for Making Minds. Those groups are Liberal Colleges. 
 
PART I 
 THE DETERMINING PURPOSE 
 
 THESE four papers are four different attempts to 
 express the notion which underlies liberal college 
 teaching. 
 
 The first paper, "What the College is Not," was given 
 at the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of Alle- 
 gheny College on June 23, 191 5. It was the closing paper 
 of a long series dealing with the work of the American 
 College. It is a study of the purpose of the college as re- 
 vealed in the minds of its founders. It challenges the 
 statement that the old college, having as a major aim the 
 educating of ministers, was therefore professional in intent. 
 It asks what kind of education was regarded as good for the 
 ministers of older days and may be equally good for those 
 of a later time. 
 
 The second paper, "What the College is," was given as 
 an inaugural address of the President of Amherst College, 
 October 16, 191 2. It is a consideration of the purpose of 
 the college as perceived by the college teacher. It seeks, 
 therefore, to define the college endeavor as it is construed 
 and felt by the teachers and scholars who, in the deepest 
 sense, are the college. 
 
 The third paper, "What does the College Prepare for," 
 is a popular talk which has been given many times to differ- 
 ent audiences and perhaps, alas, more than once to the 
 same audience. It is intended primarily to state the 
 purpose of the college to persons who are not familiar with 
 college teaching, or who, having had such familiarity, have 
 lost it. It is a controversial paper making its points, or 
 trying to make them, over-sharply as one is tempted to do 
 
12 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 when speaking to audiences at whom one has only a single 
 chance, or with whose point of view one is radically out of 
 touch. 
 
 The fourth paper, "Making the Mind of a Nation," is 
 an extract from a speech delivered at an Amherst Alumni 
 banquet in Boston, February 4, 1916. It tries to indicate to 
 the graduates of a college what part they have to play in 
 building up the life of a nation. It demands that we 
 achieve for the nation as a whole the same intellectual 
 integrity and coherence which every good teacher seeks to 
 fix upon the spirit of the individual student. 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS NOT 
 
 I MUST begin this paper by asking a question — a ques- 
 tion addressed to the audience. The answer is a matter of 
 vital concern to me. I wish to ask you whether from one 
 statement which I shall give another logically follows. If 
 we say that everything that could be said about the Ameri- 
 can college has been said, does it follow that there is noth- 
 ing more to say ? My own opinion is that it does not follow 
 at all and I appeal to the science of logic for justification. 
 That science tells us that whatever has been said in one 
 way can be said again in another, and that perhaps just 
 such translation into other forms is the chief task of what we 
 call thinking. And especially logic tells us that whatever 
 has been said in affirmative terms may often, to great ad- 
 vantage, be expressed in negative terms. 
 
 If it is truly said that "John is in Boston," it is also safe 
 to remark that "John is not in New York," and this latter 
 statement may be of much greater importance to some of 
 John's friends. There is, of course, a difficulty, namely, 
 that it is hard to exhaust the content of the negative judg- 
 ment. When once you start on this process the trouble is 
 not to find something to say but to tell where to stop in 
 the illimitable expanse which lies before you. It is well 
 enough to say that John is not in New York, but if you 
 proceed to tell all the places in which John is not, consider- 
 able time must be allowed for the operation. While, there- 
 fore, I insist that this logical principle be accepted in order 
 that I may have a subject to talk about, I beg the audience 
 not to be terrified by its possibilities. For general purposes, 
 logical principles must be applied sparingly and with dis- 
 
 13 
 
i 4 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 cretion. It is quite possible to have too much of a good 
 thing. 
 
 But the one point on which I do insist is that in spite of 
 all the wisdom of these ten wise men who have preceded me 
 there is still something left to consider. They have told 
 you what the college is. I may try to tell you what it is 
 not. They have told you what the college has, what it 
 does, what it has accomplished, what it dreams, what it 
 will be in the days to come. Somewhere within the field 
 of what it has not, what it does not do, what it has not done, 
 what it does not dream, what it will not be — somewhere 
 within this field, for which one might claim infinite time, 
 there lies the subject of this paper. 
 
 If, then, we were with any fullness to define the function 
 of the college in negative terms it would be necessary to 
 show and to explain that the college is not a high school, 
 not a professional school, not a university, nor any part 
 thereof. But everyone knows that there are many kinds 
 of high school, many types of professional school, many 
 separate schools within a university. If we should discuss 
 each one of these separatim et seriatim, showing that 
 the college is not any one of them, is different from them 
 all, I fear that the consequence for you would be much 
 weariness of the flesh and great vexation of the spirit. 
 But again the kindly science of logic will hurry to our 
 rescue. That science has another valuable principle, viz., 
 that there is no sense in denying a statement unless someone 
 has asserted it. What assertions, then, of the identity 
 of the college with other institutions are just now being 
 made with sufficient insistence to demand our attention? 
 There are teachers who seem to find little difference between 
 the college and the high school, but their lack of perception 
 is not very important. We are just emerging from a period 
 in which the college has been regarded as a part of the 
 university and has been identified with the whole in essential 
 attitude and spirit. But the day of that confusion is 
 rapidly closing. The one confusion which does today 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS NOT 15 
 
 threaten our understanding of the function of the college 
 is that which identifies it with the professional school, 
 which declares that there is no genuine education which 
 is not really professional, which characterizes the belief 
 in a "liberal education," separate from and independent 
 of vocational and professional study, as an idle creation 
 of dream and fancy. In these pragmatic days such a 
 confusion as this is likely to spread far and wide. It is 
 not the only instance of pragmatic thinking which just 
 now threatens the clarity of our educational policy, but it 
 is an especially dangerous one because - strikes at the 
 very roots of all our liberal teaching. Amid these days 
 of celebration and study of the American liberal college, 
 I should like to smite as hard as I can hit at this heresy 
 which denies the very belief on which that college is built. 
 
 The heresy is hard to meet just now because in a sense 
 it catches us ofF our balance. Under the influence of the 
 university ideal the colleges had been saying to their stu- 
 dents, "Study anything you like; all knowledge is good; 
 in fact, all knowledge is equally good; make your choice, 
 follow your bent; if only you keep going in any direction 
 a liberal education is assured." But as against this, we 
 are seeing more and more clearly every day that the con- 
 tent of a liberal education is not thus indefinite and in- 
 determinate, that there is an intellectual culture which one 
 must master if he is to travel the way of liberal education. 
 And in our enthusiasm we have been crying: "Back to 
 the good old college of earlier days, away with the extrava- 
 gances of election and specialization, let us return again 
 to the fathers, to the requirements which they established, 
 to the college which they founded." And here it is that 
 the subtle and dangerous heresy finds its opportunity. 
 "Do you wish definite and coherent requirements?" it 
 asks. "Very well, you will find them in the professional 
 
16 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 school." And if we protest that these are not the require- 
 ments that we had in mind, that they are not liberal but 
 technical, then there descends upon us a crushing and 
 bewildering argument. "You wish to return to the spirit 
 and practice of the old colonial college," it says; "very 
 well, do so, but first recognize that the college which you 
 imitate was itself a professional school. The colonial 
 forefathers were not wasting idle dreams on this airy nothing 
 which you call 'liberal training.' They needed ministers 
 for their churches and so they founded colleges to train 
 those ministers. The colleges which they established were 
 in essential purpose schools of divinity, schools to train 
 young men for the profession of the ministry. They 
 were devised for a special purpose and the forefathers were 
 shrewd enough to see to it that that purpose was realized." 
 And from this assertion as its premise, the argument pro- 
 ceeds to its conclusion. 
 
 "The old college was professional in spirit; then so too 
 should they be who imitate it in spirit. But the old college 
 intended to train for only one of the professions. To that 
 end all its courses of study, all its methods of teaching, 
 were adapted. It will never do to give the same courses 
 of study, the same teaching, to the boys who are planning 
 for other professions. Loyalty to the old college demands 
 that for each profession its own special system of prepa- 
 ration be devised; we in our day must do for lawyers, 
 engineers, physicians, architects, for each of these what the 
 fathers in their day did for the students of divinity." So 
 by the argument the college becomes simply a collection 
 of professional schools; liberal education as a thing apart 
 has disappeared. And we arrive at a new definition of the 
 American liberal college, — it is an institution which some 
 people had mistakenly believed to exist. 
 
 In considering the effect of such an argument as this it 
 is necessary to take into account the secondary result as 
 well as the primary. The first effect, as in the case of all 
 honest conflicts with convincing arguments, is that you 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS NOT 17 
 
 find yourself knocked down. The second stage of the 
 experience, however, reveals two facts: (1) that you can 
 get up again and (2) that you are not hurt, indeed that you 
 are rather exhilarated by what has happened. This sec- 
 ondary stage is proof positive that you have not been hit 
 by anything solid. At this time, it is in order to inquire 
 what it was which, at the moment of impact, gave such an 
 impression of solidity. 
 
 The most interesting feature of the argument is that the 
 premise on which it depends is not true. The premise 
 asserts that, in the sense in which we now use the term, 
 the colonial college was a professional school. But it was 
 not, nor was it intended to be. The supposed evidence 
 for the assertion is simply a confusion as to the meaning of 
 another statement which is true. There is no doubt that 
 one of the primary motives of the founders of the early 
 colleges was to provide for the education of the clergy. 
 But the assertion under discussion is not identical with this, 
 nor does it follow from it. And apart from questions of 
 inference, the plain facts of record concerning the purpose 
 of the founders forbid the suggested interpretation of their 
 intention. He who would hold to this interpretation must 
 maintain two assertions concerning our colonial forefathers: 
 (1) that they did not mean what they said, and (2) that 
 they did not get what they paid for. My impression is 
 that the antecedent probability is in both cases strongly 
 against the maker of the statements. 
 
 With regard to the purpose which the colleges were 
 intended to further, there are clear expressions in the 
 charters under which they were established. The assertion 
 under discussion is that these colleges were established to 
 give professional training to ministerial students. The 
 charter of Harvard College, granted in 1650, defines the 
 aim as "for the advancement of all good literature, arts, 
 and sciences." The new articles of 1780, reviewing the 
 achievements of the college, say "in which University 
 many persons of great eminence have, by the blessing of 
 
1 8 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 God, been initiated in those arts and sciences which qualified 
 them for public employments both in Church and State." 
 
 The charter of Yale University, the Collegiate School of 
 Connecticut, describes it as a school "wherein youth may 
 be instructed in the arts and sciences, who through the 
 blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Public employ- 
 ment both in Church and Civil State." The charter of the 
 Academy and Charitable School in the Province of Penn- 
 sylvania approves the project, "hoping that this academy 
 may prove a nursery of wisdom and virtue, and that it 
 will produce men of dispositions and capacities beneficial 
 to mankind in the various occupations of life." The charter 
 of Kings College in New York provides for the instruction 
 and education of youth in the learned languages and in 1 
 the liberal arts and sciences. The announcement reads in 
 part as follows: 
 
 "A serious, virtuous, and industrious Course of Life 
 being first provided for, it is further the Design of this 
 College, to instruct and perfect the Youth in the Learned 
 Languages, and in the Arts of Reasoning exactly, of Writing 
 correctly and Speaking eloquently; And in the Arts of 
 Numbering and Measuring, of Surveying and Navigation, 
 of Geography and History, of Husbandry, Commerce, and 
 Government; and in the Knowledge of all Nature in the 
 Heavens above us, and in the Air, Water, and Earth around 
 us, and the various Kinds of Meteors, Stones, Mines, and 
 Minerals, Plants and Animals, and of every Thing useful 
 for the Comfort, the Convenience, the Elegance of Life, 
 in the chief Manufactures relating to any of these things; 
 And finally, to lead them from the Study of Nature, to the 
 Knowledge of themselves, and of the God of Nature, and 
 their Duty to Him, themselves, and one another; and every 
 Thing that can contribute to their true Happiness, both 
 here and hereafter." 
 
 Surely this is a strange course of study for a divinity school 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS NOT 19 
 
 One of the most illuminating cases is that of Brown 
 University. The expressed intention of the founders of 
 Brown University was "to establish a seminary of polite 
 literature subject to the Government of the Baptists," 
 and beyond question they were planning for the education 
 of their own candidates for the ministry. But does this 
 mean that they planned to give professional theological 
 training in the college? If so, why is it specified that 
 youth of all religious denominations shall be accepted? 
 Was it intended that Congregationalists and Episcopalians 
 should become Baptist ministers? And why is it so defi- 
 nitely stated that "the Sectarian differences of opinions 
 shall not make any Part of the Public and Classical In- 
 struction?" Is it customary in a divinity school to forbid 
 the discussion of the tenets of the sect by which the school 
 is established? There was no such restriction when the 
 first divinity school was established at Andover in 1807, 
 for then the project was delayed until the founders could 
 agree what creed should be taught, and until it had been 
 voted that each professor should assent to the creed which 
 the Hopkinsians had prepared. Is there not a different 
 motive here from that expressed in the charter of Brown 
 which says, "Into this Liberal and Catholic Institution 
 shall never be admitted any Religious Tests but on the 
 Contrary all the Members hereof shall for ever enjoy full 
 free Absolute and uninterrupted Liberty of Conscience"? 
 In 1770 the trustees of the new college in Rhode Island 
 voted "that the children of Jews may be admitted to the 
 institution and intirely enjoy the freedom of their own 
 religion without any constraint or imposition whatever." 
 Was it in order that they might be prepared for the priest- 
 hood of their own church, or was it in the hope that the free 
 and unhampered dialectic of their own Jewish faith might 
 bring them eventually into the Baptist pulpit? 
 
 I have given only a few quotations from the charters 
 and early statutes, but on these we may safely rest the case 
 as to the purpose of the founders of the colonial colleges. 
 
J 
 
 20 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 Some people are saying to-day that the intention was to 
 give technical training for the ministry. The charters say 
 that the colleges were established to give teaching in liter- 
 ature, the arts, and sciences, with the expectation that this 
 teaching would be of value both in church and state, in all 
 the various occupations into which young men might go. 
 For my own part, the evidence of the charters is the more 
 convincing. I am inclined to think that the colonial fore- 
 fathers knew what they meant and meant what they said. 
 But now for the test of the work done. Whatever they 
 said, did the colleges actually train men for the ministry 
 in the sense in which professional schools are now preparing 
 them for separate occupations? In his book on Educational 
 Reform, President Eliot records that in the ten years from 
 1761 to 1770 the percentage of ministers among the gradu- 
 ates of Harvard College was twenty-nine, among those of 
 Yale thirty-two, and among those of Princeton forty-five. 
 In the first thirty-nine classes graduated from Brown only 
 twenty-five per cent of the members entered the ministry. 
 Now what shall we say of the seventy-one per cent at 
 Harvard, the sixty-eight per cent at Yale, the fifty-five 
 per cent at Princeton, and the seventy-five per cent at 
 Brown? These men were planning to practice law, medi- 
 cine, teaching, business. Why did they go to a divinity 
 school? Did they think that a man who is ready for the 
 ministry is ready for anything? The statement is perhaps 
 true, but hardly relevant. I venture to suggest that their 
 real opinion was that expressed in the charters we have 
 quoted, viz.: that the education which the college gave 
 was regarded as of value to a man whatever the profession 
 into which he might go. If it be urged that there were 
 no other schools to which they could go, I should reply 
 that in that case, if they had wanted something else, they 
 would have made protest long and loud, and would have 
 demanded changes in the old colleges or the establishment 
 of new ones. But a record of the attitude of the lay gradu- 
 ates of our colleges is not one of fault-finding and protest. 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS NOT 21 
 
 Rather have they shown unswerving loyalty and gratitude, 
 and because of their faith in the college and its teaching, 
 they have poured out the wealth which has enlarged the 
 college to proportions of which its founders never dreamed. 
 Benefactors and graduates alike have believed in non- 
 professional education, and have believed they were 
 receiving it. He who says that they have paid for pro- 
 fessional education says that they have paid for what 
 they thought they were not getting. Knowing them as 
 I do, I find the statement hard to accept. 
 
 The point just made presents itself in another form when 
 viewed in relation to present conditions. To the old col- 
 lege there went students planning to enter all the pro- 
 fessions, and they found there the education which they 
 sought. Of what professional school is it true to-day that 
 candidates for the other professions go to it for training? 
 Are there many law students in the medical schools, many 
 engineering students in the divinity schools, many archi- 
 tects in the schools of music? Would it not be a new type 
 of engineering school which should attract forty-five, 
 fifty-five, seventy, or seventy-five per cent of students 
 going into other professions? I think that if we found an 
 engineering school of that type we should begin to give it 
 another name, should recognize it as having a different 
 function from the one we had assigned it, should take 
 away from it the name "professional" and call it "liberal," 
 a school in which are to be found studies and teaching of 
 value to a man whatever his profession may be. To call 
 such a school technical or professional is simply to twist 
 terms out of all resemblance to their ordinary meanings. 
 It indicates a confusion of thought which demands more 
 careful analysis of the argument than we have yet given. 
 It will be worth while to examine it more closely. 
 
 The argument as it stands is one of the most common 
 types of fallacy. It says, "The colonial college prepared 
 men for the ministry; hence it did nothing else." It is the 
 argument "A is B, hence A is only B;" or again, it is, "If an 
 
22 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 object have a given quality, then it has no other quality.'' 
 "Charles Darwin was an Englishman, hence of course he 
 was not a biologist." "Spinoza was a grinder of lenses, 
 hence he cannot have been a philosopher." But Darwin 
 was a biologist in spite of the argument; and Spinoza did 
 dominate the thought of Europe, even while grinding 
 lenses in his garret. The trouble with the argument is 
 that the conclusion does not follow; there is no logical 
 connection between conclusion and premise. A may be B 
 and yet be also C and D as well. A college may be a good 
 place for a young man who plans to enter the ministry and 
 may yet have qualities and purposes of which that state- 
 ment is in no sense an adequate description. It may well 
 be that its value for ministerial students is only one phase of 
 its total and fundamental function. That this is true is 
 already apparent from its appeal to students of other 
 professions. If we can now define this total appeal, the 
 confusion should disappear and the modicum of truth 
 which the argument contains should separate itself out 
 from the vast error in which that truth has been involved. 
 
 The real motive of the founders of the early colleges, so 
 far as it concerned students for the ministry, appears in 
 the account given by Walter Cochrane Bronson in his 
 History of Brown University. The Baptists, he tells us, 
 were eager to have a college under their own control, to 
 which their ministerial students might go. But why? 
 Was it because they were not sufficiently supplied with 
 ministers, or that the candidates were unable to secure 
 the technical training needed for their profession? Not 
 at all. The reason, he tells us, was that at the time Brown 
 was established "there were only two Baptist ministers in 
 all New England who had what is called a liberal education; 
 and they were not clear in the doctrines of grace." Now 
 in accordance with the custom of the time, the leaders of 
 the denomination could easily provide for the professional 
 training of their boys by placing them in the charge of older 
 men who regularly gave such instruction to their appren- 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS NOT 23 
 
 tices. But they recognized that the denomination could 
 not hold its own, could not achieve its purpose in the com- 
 munity unless its ministers were men of power and intelli- 
 gence, men who could lead and dominate the men about 
 them. And so the Baptist Church provided for the edu- 
 cation of its young men who were candidates for the 
 ministry. Did it provide for their technical theological in- 
 struction? The charter of the college specifically denies this. 
 The purpose was to educate ministers, — but in what sense? 
 Our opponents have interpreted the purpose as that of 
 educating men to be ministers. The real purpose was that 
 of educating ministers to be men. And at the same time 
 by the same methods colleges were educating lawyers to be 
 men, and teachers, physicians, and business men to be 
 men. The same argument which proves the old college 
 to have been a divinity school would prove it to be a law 
 school, a medical school, a school of pedagogy, a business 
 school. But the argument proves too much. There is a 
 limit to the number of different things a single thing can 
 be. The old college did educate ministers just as it edu- 
 cated candidates for other professions, but it did not give 
 to each of these groups a different education. It was 
 dealing with something common to them all, and so it gave 
 to them all the same instruction, — the culture of a liberal 
 education. 
 
 11 
 
 I think it is clear that the issue we are discussing rests 
 upon the interpretation of a phrase — "founded for the 
 education of ministers." There is no doubt that the phrase 
 expresses in large measure the purpose of the early colleges. 
 But what does it mean? It is amazing to see how, in the 
 face of definite records to the contrary, this statement has 
 been taken to mean that the colleges were schools of divin- 
 ity. But the phrase admits of another interpretation which 
 has the advantage of agreeing with the records. What does 
 it mean to teach a minister? Does it mean only to teach 
 
2 4 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 him to be a minister? He has many other things to learn 
 besides that. He is taught by his wife, taught by his 
 children, by his friends, and by his enemies. But the 
 caddie who teaches him to play golf does not thereby be- 
 come a member of a faculty of divinity; he may even not 
 be a professor of religion. A school for the deaf does not 
 necessarily teach deafness, nor does a school for foreigners 
 usually teach them to be foreign. A school for anybody 
 may undertake to teach him what he needs to know. Our 
 colonial forefathers were persuaded that ministers as well 
 as other men need knowledge of things outside their pro- 
 fession, need knowledge of the arts and sciences, and it was 
 that belief which found expression in the colleges which 
 they established. 
 
 The argument which we have been attacking has told us 
 to follow the example of the colonial college. If I under- 
 stand at all the purpose of the modern liberal college that 
 is just what it is doing. There is a vast difference in in- 
 tellectual content as between the old college and the new, 
 but the two institutions are at one in the belief in the value 
 of knowledge as the guide of human life, and in the con- 
 viction that certain elements of knowledge are of common 
 value to all men whatever their differences of occupation 
 or trade. 
 
 I should like to have the privilege of attempting one last 
 restatement of this conviction in positive terms before 
 this paper is closed. 
 
 in 
 
 In the old colonial community, the clergyman, as in 
 lesser degree the lawyer and the teacher, was the man of 
 ideas. He was no mere teacher of the gospel and tender 
 of the parish. While his people lived their lives it was 
 his task to reflect upon their living, to formulate the be- 
 liefs on which it was based, to study the conditions by which 
 it was molded, to bring to clearness the problems by which 
 it was faced, to study the moral, social, economic, political 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS NOT 25 
 
 situations of which it was constituted. It was his part 
 and the part of men of like intellectual development to 
 attempt to understand the lives which other men were 
 living with lesser degrees of understanding. It was his 
 task to serve as prophet and seer, as guide and counselor 
 of his people. 
 
 It was for this task that the liberal college intended to 
 prepare him. And in these latter days, as the scope of 
 education has been extended more and more broadly, 
 the same liberal education has been given to great numbers 
 of our young men, whatever the professions they are plan- 
 ning to enter. At the present time a very small percentage 
 of our college graduates become ministers; more than half 
 of them enter into some form of business occupation. But 
 whether they are to be in business or in the ministry, the 
 same education must be given them, since the new com- 
 munity has the same need as had the old of understanding 
 itself, of stating itself in terms of ideas. 
 
 This fundamental belief of liberal education can be 
 stated in terms of two principles. The first is shared by 
 both liberal and technical teaching. The second applies 
 to liberal education alone. The principles are these: 
 (1) that activity guided by ideas is on the whole more 
 successful than the same activity without the control of 
 ideas, and (2) that in the activities common to all men the 
 guidance by ideas is quite as essential as in the case of those 
 which different groups of men carry on in differentiation 
 from one another. 
 
 The first principle applies to all higher education. We 
 recognize that human deeds may be done in either of two 
 ways, — first, by habit, by custom, by tradition, by rule 
 of thumb, just as they always have been done; or, on the 
 other hand, under the guidance of study, of investigation, 
 of ideas and principles by which men attempt to discover 
 and to formulate knowledge as to how these activities can 
 best be done. Now all higher education, liberal or pro- 
 fessional, rests on the belief that on the whole an activity 
 
26 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 which is understood will be more successful than one which 
 is not understood. Knowledge pays; intelligence is power. 
 The liberal school and the professional are, however, 
 separated by their choice of the activities which each shall 
 study. Every professional school selects some one special 
 group of activities carried on by the members of one special 
 trade or occupation and brings to the furtherance of these 
 the full light of intellectual understanding and guidance. 
 The liberal school, on the other hand, takes as its content 
 those activities which all men carry on, those deeds which 
 a man must do in virtue of the fact that he is a man; and 
 within this field it seeks to achieve the same enlightenment 
 and insight. The liberal college would learn and teach 
 what can be known about a man's moral experience, our 
 common speech, our social relations, our political insti- 
 tutions, our religious aspirations and beliefs, the world of 
 nature which surrounds and molds us, our intellectual and 
 aesthetic strivings and yearnings — all these, the human 
 things that all men share, the liberal school attempts to 
 understand, believing that if they are understood, men can 
 live them better than they would live them by mere tra- 
 dition and blind custom. But one of the terrible things 
 about our generation is that the principle which it accepts 
 so eagerly in the field of the vocation it refuses and shuns 
 in the deeper things of human living. I have known fathers, 
 planning for the training of a son, who would see to it that 
 in the preparation for his trade every bit of knowledge he 
 can have is supplied him. If the boy is to be a dyer of 
 cloth, then he must study the sciences that understand 
 that process. All that can be known about the nature of 
 fabrics, the constitution of dyestuffs, the processes of 
 application and development of the dye — not one bit of 
 all this may be lacking from the teaching of the boy. To 
 put him into the shop without that knowledge, to let him 
 learn by imitation, pick up the rule of thumb, follow the 
 ways of master workmen of the trade — to do that would 
 be to make him only a workman, one who can do what 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS NOT 27 
 
 has been done, can do what he is told to do. But the 
 father is not content with this. His boy must understand 
 and know the trade so that he may be the leader and the 
 guide, may give the orders rather than obey them. But 
 how often the same father is unwilling that his boy attempt 
 to understand his own religion, his own morals, his own 
 society, his own politics! In these fields, surely the father's 
 opinions are good enough! Keep the boy's mind at rest 
 regarding his religion and his economics; what has been 
 believed before had better still be believed! It may be 
 bad for business, may interfere with a boy's success if he 
 becomes too much interested in the fundamental things of 
 life! And so such parents invite us to leave the universal 
 things, the things most sacred and significant, to blindness, 
 to the mere drift of custom, to tradition, and rule of thumb. 
 And here it is that the liberal college again asserts its loyalty 
 to the men who founded the older institutions. Those men 
 had intellectual faith; they believed that it is worth while 
 to know the life of man, and so they studied it and taught 
 it to their pupils. I know that I speak for the teachers 
 and the administrators of the liberal college here represented 
 to-day when I pledge anew our loyalty to the men in whose 
 footsteps we follow. So far as we can bring it about, the 
 young people of our generation shall know themselves, shall 
 know their fellows, shall think their way into the common 
 life of their people, and by their thought shall illumine 
 and direct it. If we are not pledged to that, then we have 
 deserted the old standard; we are apostates from the 
 faith. But I think that a good many of us are still loyal. 
 We welcome every new extension of vocational instruction. 
 We know that every man should have some special task 
 to do and should be trained to do that task as well as it 
 can possibly be done. The more the special trades and 
 occupations are guided and directed by skill and knowledge 
 the more will human life succeed in doing the things it 
 plans to do. But by the same principle we pledge ourselves 
 to the study of the universal things in human life, the 
 
28 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 things that make us men as well as ministers and tradesmen. 
 We pledge ourselves forever to the study of human living 
 in order that living may be better done. We have not 
 yet forgotten that fundamentally the proper study of man- 
 kind is Man. 
 
II 
 
 WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 
 
 IN the discussions concerning college education there is 
 one voice which is all too seldom raised and all too often 
 disregarded. It is the voice of the teacher and the scholar, 
 of the member of the college faculty. It is my purpose 
 to devote this address to a consideration of the ideals of 
 the teacher, of the problems of instruction as they present 
 themselves to the men who are giving the instruction. 
 And I do this not because I believe that just now the teachers 
 are wiser than others who are dealing with the same ques- 
 tions, but rather as an expression of a definite conviction 
 with regard to the place of the teacher in our educational 
 scheme. It is, I believe, the function of the teacher to 
 stand before his pupils and before the community at large 
 as the intellectual leader of his time. If he is not able to 
 take this leadership, he is not worthy of his calling. If the 
 leadership is taken from him and given to others, then the 
 very foundations of the scheme of instruction are shaken. 
 He who in matters of teaching must be led by others is not 
 the one to lead the imitative undergraduate, not the one 
 to inspire the confidence and loyalty and discipleship on 
 which all true teaching depends. If there are others who 
 can do these things better than the college teacher of to- 
 day, then we must bring them within the college walls. 
 But if the teacher fs to be deemed worthy of his task, then 
 he must be recognized as the teacher of us all, and we must 
 listen to his words as he speaks of the matters entrusted 
 to his charge. 
 
 In the consideration of the educational creed of the 
 teacher I will try to give, first, a brief statement of his 
 
 29 
 
3 o THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 belief; second, a defense of it against other views of the 
 function of the college; third, an interpretation of its 
 meaning and significance; fourth, a criticism of what seem 
 to me misunderstandings of their own meaning prevalent 
 among the teachers of our day; and finally, a suggestion 
 of certain changes in policy which must follow if the belief 
 of the teacher is clearly understood and applied in our 
 educational procedure. 
 
 i 
 
 First, then, What do our teachers believe to be the aim 
 of college instruction? Wherever their opinions and con- 
 victions find expression there is one contention which is 
 always in the foreground, namely, that to be liberal a college 
 must be essentially intellectual. It is a place, the teachers 
 tell us, in which a boy, forgetting all things else, may set 
 forth on the enterprise of learning. It is a time when a 
 young man may come to awareness of the thinking of his 
 people, may perceive what knowledge is and has been and 
 is to be. Whatever light-hearted undergraduates may say, 
 whatever the opinions of solicitous parents, of ambitious 
 friends, of employers in search of workmen, of leaders in 
 church or state or business, — whatever may be the beliefs 
 and desires and demands of outsiders, — the teacher 
 within the college, knowing his mission as no one else can 
 know it, proclaims that mission to be the leading of his 
 pupil into the life intellectual. The college is primarily 
 not a place of the body, nor of the feelings, nor even of the 
 will; it is, first of all, a place of the mind. 
 
 ii 
 
 Against this intellectual interpretation of the college 
 our teachers find two sets of hostile forces constantly at 
 work. Outside the walls there are the practical demands 
 of a busy commercial and social scheme; within the college 
 there are the trivial and sentimental and irrational mis- 
 understandings of its own friends. Upon each of these 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 31 
 
 our college teachers are wont to descend as Samson upon 
 the Philistines, and when they have had their will, there 
 is little left for another to accomplish. 
 
 As against the immediate practical demands from with- 
 out, the issue is clear and decisive. College teachers know 
 that the world must have trained workmen, skilled oper- 
 atives, clever buyers and sellers, efficient directors, re- 
 sourceful manufacturers, able lawyers, ministers, physicians 
 and teachers. But it is equally true that in order to do 
 its own work, the liberal college must leave the special and 
 technical training for these trades and professions to be 
 done in other schools and by other methods. In a word, 
 the liberal college does not pretend to give all the kinds of 
 teaching which a young man of college age may profitably 
 receive; it does not even claim to give all the kinds of in- 
 tellectual training which are worth giving. It is com- 
 mitted to intellectual training of the liberal type, whatever 
 that may mean, and to that mission it must be faithful. 
 One may safely say, then, on behalf of our college teachers, 
 that their instruction is intended to be radically different 
 from that given in the technical school or even in the pro- 
 fessional school. Both these institutions are practical in 
 a sense in which the college, as an intellectual institution, is 
 not. In the technical school the pupil is taught how to do 
 some one of the mechanical operations which contribute 
 to human welfare. He is trained to print, to weave, to 
 farm, to build; and for the most part he is trained to do 
 these things by practice rather than by theory. His pos- 
 session when he leaves the school is not a stock of ideas, 
 of scientific principles, but a measure of skill, a collection 
 of rules of thumb. His primary function as a tradesman 
 is not to understand but to do, and in doing what is needed 
 he is following directions which have first been thought out 
 by others and are now practised by him. The technical 
 school intends to furnish training which, in the sense in 
 which we use the term, is not intellectual but practical. 
 
 In a corresponding way the work of the professional 
 
32 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 school differs from that of the liberal college. In the 
 teaching of engineering, medicine, or law we are or may be 
 beyond the realm of mere skill and within the realm of 
 ideas and principles. But the selection and the relating 
 of these ideas is dominated by an immediate practical 
 interest which cuts them off from the intellectual point 
 of view of the scholar. If an undergraduate should take 
 away from his studies of chemistry, biology and psychology 
 only those parts which have immediate practical appli- 
 cation in the field of medicine, the college teachers would 
 feel that they had failed to give to the boy the kind of 
 instruction demanded of a college. It is not their purpose 
 to furnish applied knowledge in this sense. They are not 
 willing to cut up their sciences into segments and to allow 
 the student to select those segments which may be of 
 service in the practice of an art or of a profession. In one 
 way or another the teacher feels a kinship with the scientist 
 and the scholar which forbids him to submit to this domi- 
 nation of his instruction by the demands of an immediate 
 practical interest. Whatever it may mean, he intends to 
 hold the intellectual point of view and to keep his students 
 with him if he can. In response, then, to demands for 
 technical and professional training our college teachers 
 tell us that such training may be obtained in other schools; 
 it is not to be had in a college of liberal culture. 
 
 In the conflict with the forces within the college our 
 teachers find themselves fighting essentially the same battle 
 as against the foes without. In a hundred different ways 
 the friends of the college, students, graduates, trustees and 
 even colleagues, seem to them so to misunderstand its 
 mission as to minimize or to falsify its intellectual ideals. 
 The college is a good place for making friends; it gives 
 excellent experience in getting on with men; it has excep- 
 tional advantages as an athletic club; it is a relatively safe 
 place for a boy when he first leaves home; on the whole 
 it may improve a student's manners; it gives acquaintance 
 with lofty ideals of character, preaches the doctrine of 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 33 
 
 social service, exalts the virtues and duties of citizenship. 
 All these conceptions seem to the teacher to hide or to 
 obscure the fact that the college is fundamentally a place 
 of the mind, a time for thinking, an opportunity for know- 
 ing. And perhaps in proportion to their own loftiness 
 of purpose and motive they are the more dangerous as 
 tending all the more powerfully to replace or to nullify 
 the underlying principle upon which they all depend, 
 Here again when misconception clears away, one can have 
 no doubt that the battle of the teacher is a righteous one. 
 It is well that a boy should have four good years of athletic 
 sport, playing his own games and watching the games of 
 his fellows; it is well that his manners should be improved; 
 it is worth while to make good friends; it is very desirable 
 to develop the power of understanding and working with 
 other men; it is surely good to grow in strength and purity 
 of character, in devotion to the interests of society, in 
 readiness to meet the obligations and opportunities of 
 citizenship. If any one of these be lacking from the fruits 
 of a college course we may well complain of the harvest. 
 And yet is it not true that by sheer pressure of these, by 
 the driving and pulling of the social forces within and 
 without the college, the mind of the student is constantly 
 torn from its chief concern ? Do not our social and practical 
 interests distract our boys from the intellectual achieve- 
 ments which should dominate their imagination and com- 
 mand their zeal? I believe that one may take it as the 
 deliberate judgment of the teachers of our colleges to-day 
 that the function of the college is constantly misunderstood, 
 and that it is subjected to demands which, however friendly 
 in intent, are yet destructive of its intellectual efficiency 
 and success. 
 
 in 
 
 But now that the contention of the teacher has been 
 stated and reaffirmed against objections, it is time to ask, 
 What does it mean? And how can it be justified? By 
 
34 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 what right does a company of scholars invite young men 
 to spend with them four years of discipleship? Do they, 
 in their insistence upon the intellectual quality of their 
 ideal intend to give an education which is avowedly un- 
 practical? If so, how shall they justify their invitation, 
 which may perhaps divert young men from other interests 
 and other companionships which are valuable to them- 
 selves and to their fellows? In a word, what is the under- 
 lying motive of the teacher, what is there in the intellectual 
 interests and activities which seems to him to warrant their 
 domination over the training and instruction of young men 
 during the college years ? 
 
 It is no fair answer to this question to summon us to 
 faith in intellectual ideals, to demand of us that we live 
 the life of the mind with confidence in the virtues of in- 
 telligence, that we love knowledge and because of our pas- 
 sion follow after it. Most of us are already eager to accept 
 intellectual ideals, but our very devotion to them forbids 
 that we accept them blindly. I have often been struck 
 by the inner contradictoriness of the demand that we have 
 faith in intelligence. It seems to mean, as it is so commonly 
 made to mean, that we must unintelligently follow intelli- 
 gence, that we must ignorantly pursue knowledge, that we 
 must question everything except the business of asking 
 questions, that we think about everything except the use 
 of thinking itself. As Mr. F. H. Bradley would say, the 
 dictum, "Have faith in intelligence" is so true that it con- 
 stantly threatens to become false. Our very conviction 
 of its truth compels us to scrutinize and test it to the end. 
 
 How then shall we justify the faith of the teacher? What 
 reason can we give for our exaltation of intellectual training 
 and activity? To this question two answers are possible. 
 First, knowledge and thinking are good in themselves. 
 Secondly, they help us in the attainment of other values 
 in life which without them would be impossible. Both 
 these answers may be given and are given by college teachers. 
 Within them must be found whatever can be said by way 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 35 
 
 of explanation and justification of the work of the liberal 
 college. 
 
 The first answer receives just now far less of recognition 
 than it can rightly claim. When the man of the world 
 is told that a boy is to be trained in thinking just because 
 of the joys and satisfactions of thinking itself, just in order 
 that he may go on thinking as long as he lives, the man of 
 the world has been heard to scoff and to ridicule the idle 
 dreaming of scholarly men. But if thinking is not a good 
 thing in itself, if intellectual activity is not worth while 
 for its own sake, will the man of the world tell us what is? 
 There are those among us who find so much satisfaction 
 in the countless trivial and vulgar amusements of a crude 
 people that they have no time for the joys of the mind. 
 There are those who are so closely shut up within a little 
 round of petty pleasures that they have never dreamed of 
 the fun of reading and conversing and investigating and 
 reflecting. And of these one can only say that the differ- 
 ence is one of taste, and that their tastes seem to be rela- 
 tively dull and stupid. Surely it is one function of the 
 liberal college to save boys from that stupidity, to give 
 them an appetite for the pleasures of thinking, to make 
 them sensitive to the joys of appreciation and understand- 
 ing, to show them how sweet and captivating and whole- 
 some are the games of the mind. At the time when the 
 play element is still dominant it is worth while to acquaint 
 boys with the sport of facing and solving problems. Apart 
 from some of the experiences of friendship and sympathy 
 I doubt if there are any human interests so permanently 
 satisfying, so fine and splendid in themselves as are those 
 of intellectual activity. To give our boys that zest, that 
 delight in things intellectual, to give them an appreciation 
 of a kind of life which is well worth living, to make them 
 men of intellectual culture — that certainly is one part of 
 the work of any liberal college. 
 
 On the other hand, the creation of culture as so defined 
 can never constitute the full achievement of the college. 
 
36 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 It is essential to awaken the impulses of inquiry, of experi- 
 ment, of investigation, of reflection, the instinctive cravings 
 of the mind. But no liberal college can be content with 
 this. The impulse to thinking must be questioned and 
 rationalized as must every other instinctive response. It 
 is well to think, but what shall we think about? Are there 
 any lines of investigation and reflection more valuable 
 than others, and if so, how is their value to be tested? 
 Or again, if the impulse for thinking comes into conflict with 
 other desires and cravings, how is the opposition to be 
 solved? It has sometimes been suggested that our man 
 of intellectual culture may be found like Nero fiddling with 
 words while all the world about him is aflame. And the 
 point of the suggestion is not that fiddling is a bad and 
 worthless pastime, but rather that it is inopportune on 
 such an occasion, that the man who does it is out of touch 
 with his situation, that his fiddling does not fit his facts. 
 In a word, men know with regard to thinking, as with 
 regard to every other content of human experience, that it 
 cannot be valued merely in terms of itself. It must be 
 measured in terms of its relation to other contents and to 
 human experience as a whole. Thinking is good in itself, 
 — but what does it cost of other things, what does it bring 
 of other values? Place it amid all the varied contents of 
 our individual and social experience, measure it in terms 
 of what it implies, fix it by means of its relations, and then 
 you will know its worth not simply in itself but in that 
 deeper sense which comes when human desires are rational- 
 ized and human lives are known in their entirety, as well 
 as they can be known by those who are engaged in living 
 them. 
 
 In this consideration we find the second answer of the 
 teacher to the demand for justification of the work of the 
 college. Knowledge is good, he tells us, not only in itself, 
 but in its enrichment and enhancement of the other values 
 of our experience. In the deepest and fullest sense of the 
 words, knowledge pays. This statement rests upon the 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 37 
 
 classification of human actions into two groups, those of 
 the instinctive type and those of the intellectual type. By 
 far the greater part of our human acts are carried on without 
 any clear idea of what we are going to do or how we are 
 going to do it. For the most part our responses to our 
 situations are the immediate responses of feeling, of per- 
 ception, of custom, of tradition. But slowly and painfully, 
 as the mind has developed, action after action has been 
 translated from the feeling to the ideational type; in wider 
 and wider fields men have become aware of their own 
 modes of action, more and more they have come to under- 
 standing, to knowledge of themselves and of their needs. 
 And the principle underlying all our educational procedure 
 is that on the whole, actions become more successful as 
 they pass from the sphere of feeling to that of understanding. 
 Our educational belief is that in the long run if men know 
 what they are going to do and how they are going to do it, 
 and what is the nature of the situation with which they are 
 dealing, their response to that situation will be better 
 adjusted and more beneficial than are the responses of the 
 feeling type in like situations. 
 
 It is all too obvious that there are limits to the validity 
 of this principle. If men are to investigate, to consider, to 
 decide, then action must be delayed and we must pay the 
 penalty of waiting. If men are to endeavor to understand 
 and know their situations, then we must be prepared to see 
 them make mistakes in their thinking, lose their certainty 
 of touch, wander off" into pitfalls and illusions and fallacies 
 of thought, and in consequence secure for the time results 
 far lower in value than those of the instinctive response 
 which they seek to replace. The delays and mistakes and 
 uncertainties of our thinking are a heavy price to pay, 
 but it is the conviction of the teacher that the price is as 
 nothing when compared with the goods which it buys. 
 You may point out to him the loss when old methods of 
 procedure give way before the criticism of understanding, 
 you may remind him of the pain and suffering when old 
 
38 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 habits of thought and action are replaced, you may reprove 
 him for all the blunders of the past; but in spite of it all 
 he knows and you know that in human lives taken separately 
 and in human life as a whole men's greatest lack is the lack 
 of understanding, their greatest hope to know themselves 
 and the world in which they live. 
 
 Within the limits of this general educational principle 
 the place of the liberal college may easily be fixed. In 
 the technical school pupils are prepared for a specific work 
 and are kept for the most part on the plane of perceptual 
 action, doing work which others understand. In the pro- 
 fessional school, students are properly within the realm of 
 ideas and principles, but they are still limited to a specific 
 human interest with which alone their understanding 
 is concerned. But the college is called liberal as against 
 both of these because the instruction is dominated by no 
 special interest, is limited to no single human task, but is 
 intended to take human activity as a whole, to understand 
 human endeavors not in their isolation but in their relations 
 to one another and to the total experience which we call 
 the life of our people. And just as we believe that the 
 building of ships has become more successful as men have 
 come to a knowledge of the principles involved in their 
 construction; just as the practice of medicine has become 
 more successful as we have come to a knowledge of the 
 human body, of the conditions within it and the influences 
 without; — just so the teacher in the liberal college believes 
 that life as a total enterprise, life as it presents itself to each 
 one of us in his career as an individual, — human living, — 
 will be more successful in so far as men come to understand 
 it and to know it as they attempt to carry it on. To give 
 boys an intellectual grasp on human experience — this, it 
 seems to me, is the teacher's conception of the chief function 
 of the liberal college. 
 
 May I call attention to the fact that this second answer 
 of the teacher defines the aim of the college as avowedly 
 and frankly practical? Knowledge is to be sought chiefly 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 39 
 
 for the sake of its contribution to the other activities of 
 human living. But on the other hand, it is as definitely 
 declared that in method the college is fully and unre- 
 servedly intellectual. If we can see that these two demands 
 are not in conflict but that they stand together in the 
 harmonious relation of means and ends, of instrument and 
 achievement, of method and result, we may escape many 
 a needless conflict and keep our educational policy in single- 
 ness of aim and action. To do this we must show that the 
 college is intellectual, not as opposed to practical interests 
 and purposes, but as opposed to unpractical and unwise 
 methods of work. The issue is not between practical and 
 intellectual aims but between the immediate and the 
 remote aim, between the hasty and the measured procedure, 
 between the demand for results at once and the willingness 
 to wait for the best results. The intellectual road to suc- 
 cess is longer and more roundabout than any other, but 
 they who are strong and willing for the climbing are brought 
 to higher levels of achievement than they could possibly 
 have attained had they gone straight forward in the path- 
 way of quick returns. If this were not true the liberal 
 college would have no proper place in our life at all. In 
 so far as it is true the college has a right to claim the best 
 of our young men to give them its preparation for the 
 living they are to do. 
 
 IV 
 
 But now that we have attempted to interpret the in- 
 tellectual mission of the college, it may be fair to ask, 
 "Are the teachers and scholars of our day always faithful 
 to that mission? Do their statements and their practice 
 always ring in accord with the principle which has been 
 stated?" It seems to me that at two points they are 
 constantly off the key, constantly at variance with the 
 reasons by which alone their teaching can be justified. 
 
 In the first place, it often appears as if our teachers and 
 scholars were deliberately in league to mystify and befog 
 
4 o THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 the popular mind regarding this practical value of intel- 
 lectual work. They seem not to wish too much said about 
 the results and benefits. Their desire is to keep aloft the 
 intellectual banner, to proclaim the intellectual gospel, 
 to demand of student and public alike adherence to the 
 faith. And in general when they are questioned as to 
 results they give little satisfaction except to those who are 
 already pledged to unwavering confidence in their ipse 
 dixits. And largely as a result of this attitude the American 
 people seem to me to have little understanding of the 
 intellectual work of the college. Our citizens and patrons 
 can see the value of games and physical exercises; they 
 readily perceive the importance of the social give and 
 take of a college democracy; they can appreciate the 
 value of studies which prepare a young man for his pro- 
 fession and so anticipate or replace the professional school; 
 they can even believe that if a boy is kept at some sort of 
 thinking for four years his mind may become more acute, 
 more systematic, more accurate, and hence more useful 
 than it was before. But as for the content of a college 
 course, as for the value of knowledge, what a boy gains by 
 knowing Greek or economics, philosophy or literature, 
 history or biology, except as they are regarded as having 
 professional usefulness, I think our friends are in the dark 
 and are likely to remain so until we turn on the light. 
 When our teachers say, as they sometimes do say, that 
 the effect of knowledge upon the character and life of the 
 student must always be for the college an accident, a cir- 
 cumstance which has no essential connection with its real 
 aim or function, then it seems to me that our educational 
 policy is wholly out of joint. If there be no essential con- 
 nection between instruction and life, then there is no reason 
 for giving instruction except in so far as it is pleasant in 
 itself, and we have no educational policy at all. As against 
 this hesitancy, this absence of a conviction, we men of the 
 college should declare in clear and unmistakable terms our 
 creed — the creed that knowledge is justified by its results. 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 41 
 
 We should say to our people so plainly that they cannot 
 misunderstand, "Give us your boys, give us the means we 
 need, and we will so train and inform the minds of those 
 boys that their own lives and the lives of the men about 
 them shall be more successful than they could be without 
 our training. Give us our chance and we will show your 
 boys what human living is, for we are convinced that they 
 can live better in knowledge than they can in ignorance." 
 
 There is a second wandering from the faith which is so 
 common among investigators that it may fairly be called 
 the "fallacy of the scholar." It is the belief that all knowl- 
 edge is so good that all parts of knowledge are equally good. 
 Ask many of our scholars and teachers what subjects a 
 boy should study in order that he may gain insight for 
 human living, and they will say, "It makes no difference 
 in what department of knowledge he studies; let him go 
 into Sanskrit or bacteriology, into mathematics or history; 
 if only he goes where men are actually dealing with in- 
 tellectual problems, and if only he learns how to deal with 
 problems himself, the aim of education is achieved, he has 
 entered into intellectual activity." This point of view, 
 running through all the varieties of the elective system, 
 seems to me hopelessly at variance with any sound edu- 
 cational doctrine. It represents the scholar of the day 
 at his worst both as a thinker and as a teacher. In so far 
 as it dominates a group of college teachers it seems to me 
 to render them unfit to determine and to administer a 
 college curriculum. It is an announcement that they have 
 no guiding principles in their educational practice, no 
 principles of selection in their arrangement of studies, no 
 genuine grasp on the relationship between knowledge and 
 life. It is the concerted statement of a group of men each 
 of whom is lost within the limits of his own special studies, 
 and who as a group seem not to realize the organic relation- 
 ships between them nor the common task which should 
 bind them together. 
 
 In bringing this second criticism against our scholars I 
 
42 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 am not urging that the principle of election of college studies 
 should be entirely discontinued. But I should like to 
 inquire by what right and within what limits it is justified. 
 The most familiar argument in its favor is that if a student 
 is allowed to choose along the lines of his own intellectual 
 or professional interest he will have enthusiasm, the eager- 
 ness which comes with the following of one's own bent. 
 Now just so far as this result is achieved, just so far as the 
 quality of scholarship is improved, the procedure is good and 
 we may follow it if we do not thereby lose other results 
 more valuable than our gain. But if the special interest 
 comes into conflict with more fundamental ones, if what 
 the student prefers is opposed to what he ought to prefer, 
 then we of the college cannot leave the choice with him. 
 We must say to him frankly, "If you do not care for liberal 
 training you had better go elsewhere; we have a special 
 and definite task assigned us which demands that we keep 
 free from the domination of special or professional pursuits. 
 So long as we are faithful to that task we cannot give you 
 what you ask. " 
 
 In my opinion, however, the fundamental motive of 
 the elective system is not the one which has been mentioned. 
 In the last resort our teachers allow students to choose 
 their own studies not in order to appeal to intellectual or 
 to professional interest, but because they themselves have 
 no choice of their own in which they believe with sufficient 
 intensity to impose it upon their pupils. And this lack 
 of a dominating educational policy is in turn an expression 
 of an intellectual attitude, a point of view, which marks 
 the scholars of our time. In a word, it seems to me that 
 our willingness to allow students to wander about in the 
 college curriculum is one of the most characteristic expres- 
 sions of a certain intellectual agnosticism, a kind of intel- 
 lectual bankruptcy, into which, in spite of all our wealth 
 of information, the spirit of the time has fallen. Let me 
 explain my meaning. 
 
 The old classical curriculum was founded by men who had 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 43 
 
 a theory of the world and of human life. They had taken 
 all the available content of human knowledge and had 
 wrought it together into a coherent whole. What they 
 knew was, as judged by our standards, very little in amount. 
 But upon that little content they had expended all the 
 infinite pains of understanding and interpretation. They 
 had taken the separate judgments of science, philosophy, 
 history and the arts, and had so welded them together, 
 so established their relationships with one another, so freed 
 them from contradictions and ambiguities that, so far as 
 might be in their day and generation, human life as a whole 
 and the world about us were known, were understood, 
 were rationalized. They had a knowledge of human 
 experience by which they could live and which they could 
 teach to others engaged in the activities of living. 
 
 But with the invention of methods of scientific investi- 
 gation and discovery there came pouring into the mind of 
 Europe great masses of intellectual material, — astronomy, 
 physics, chemistry. This content for a time it could not 
 understand, could not relate to what it already knew. 
 The old boundary lines did not enclose the new fields, the 
 old explanations and interpretations would not fit the new 
 facts. Knowledge had not grown, it had simply been 
 enlarged, and the two masses of content, the old and the 
 new, stood facing each other with no common ground of 
 understanding. Here was the intellectual task of the great 
 leaders of the early modern thought of Europe: to re- 
 establish the unity of knowledge, to discover the relation- 
 ships between these apparently hostile bodies of judgments, 
 to know the world again, but with all the added richness 
 of the new insights and the new information. This was the 
 work of Leibnitz and Spinoza, of Kant and Hegel, and 
 those who labored with them. And in a very considerable 
 measure the task had been accomplished, order had been 
 restored. But again with the inrush of the newer dis- 
 coveries, first in the field of biology and then later in the 
 world of human relationships, the difficulties have returned, 
 
44 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 multiplied a thousand fold. Every day sees a new field 
 of facts opened up, a new method of investigation invented, 
 a new department of knowledge established. And in the 
 rush of it all these new sciences come merely as additions, 
 not to be understood but simply numbered, not to be 
 interpreted but simply listed in the great collection of 
 separate fields of knowledge. If you will examine the work 
 of any scientist within one of these fields you will find him 
 ordering, systematizing, reducing to principles, in a word, 
 knowing every fact in terms of its relation to every other 
 fact and to the whole field within which it falls. But at 
 the same time these separate sciences, these separate groups 
 of judgment, are left standing side by side with no intel- 
 ligible connections, no establishment of relationships, no 
 interpretation in the sense in which we insist upon it within 
 each of the fields taken by itself. Is it not the character- 
 istic statement of a scholar of our time to say, "I do not 
 know what may be the ultimate significance of these facts 
 and these principles; all that I know is that if you will 
 follow my methods within my field you will find the facts 
 coming into order, the principles coming into simple and 
 coherent arrangement. With any problems apart from this 
 order and this arrangement I have intellectually no con- 
 cern." 
 
 It has become an axiom with us that the genuine student 
 labors within his own field. And if the student ventures 
 forth to examine the relations of his field to the surrounding 
 country he very easily becomes a populariser, a litterateur, 
 a speculator, and worst of all, unscientific. Now I do not 
 object to a man's minding his own intellectual business if 
 he chooses to do so, but when a man minds his own business 
 because he does not know any other business, because he 
 has no knowledge whatever of the relationships which 
 justify his business and make it worth while, then I think 
 one may say that though such a man minds his own affairs 
 he does not know them, he does not understand them. 
 Such a man, from the point of view of the demands of a 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 45 
 
 liberal education, differs in no essential respect from the 
 tradesman who does not understand his trade or the pro- 
 fessional man who merely practices his profession. Just 
 as truly as they, he is shut up within a special interest; 
 just as truly as they he is making no intellectual attempt 
 to understand his experience in its unity. And the pity 
 of it is that more and more the chairs in our colleges are 
 occupied by men who have only this special interest, this 
 specialized information, and it is through them that we 
 attempt to give our boys a liberal education, which the 
 teachers themselves have not achieved. 
 
 I should not like to be misunderstood in making this 
 railing accusation against our teachers and our time. If 
 I say that our knowledge is at present a collection of scat- 
 tered observations about the world rather than an under- 
 standing of it, fairness compels the admission that the failure 
 is due to the inherent difficulties of the situation and to the 
 novelty of the problems presented. If I cry out against 
 the agnosticism of our people it is not as one who has escaped 
 from it, nor as one who would point the way back to the 
 older synthesis, but simply as one who believes that the 
 time has come for a reconstruction, for a new synthesis. 
 We have had time enough now to get some notion of our 
 bearings, shocks enough to get over our nervousness and 
 discomfiture when a new one comes along. It is the op- 
 portunity and the obligation of this generation to think 
 through the content of our knowing once again, to under- 
 stand it, so far as we can. And in such a battle as this, 
 surely it is the part of the college to take the lead. Here 
 is the mission of the college teacher as of no other member 
 of our common life. Surely he should stand before his 
 pupils and before all of us as a man who has achieved some 
 understanding of this human situation of ours, but more 
 than that, as one who is eager for the conflict with the 
 powers of darkness and who can lead his pupils in enthusi- 
 astic devotion to the common cause of enlightment. 
 
46 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 And now, finally, after these attacks upon the policies 
 which other men have derived from their love of knowl- 
 edge, may I suggest two matters of policy which seem to me 
 to follow from the definition of education which we have 
 taken? The first concerns the content of the college 
 course; the second has to do with the method of its presen- 
 tation to the undergraduate. 
 
 We have said that the system of free election is natural 
 for those to whom knowledge is simply a number of separate 
 departments. It is equally true that just in so far as 
 knowledge attains unity, just so far as the relations of the 
 various departments are perceived, freedom of election 
 by the student must be limited. For it at once appears 
 that on the one side there are vast ranges of information 
 which have virtually no significance for the purposes of a 
 liberal education, while on the other hand there are certain 
 elements so fundamental and vital that without any one 
 of them a liberal education is impossible. 
 
 I should like to indicate certain parts of human knowledge 
 which seems to me so essential that no principle of election 
 should ever be allowed to drive them out of the course of 
 any college student. 
 
 First, a student should become acquainted with the 
 fundamental motives and purposes and beliefs which, 
 clearly or unclearly recognized, underlie all human experi- 
 ence and bind it together. He must perceive the moral 
 strivings, the intellectual endeavors, the aesthetic experi- 
 ences of his race, and closely linked with these, determining 
 and determined by them, the beliefs about the world which 
 have appeared in our systems of religion. To investigate 
 this field, to bring it to such clearness of formulation as may 
 be possible, is the task of philosophy — an essential element 
 in any liberal education. Secondly, as in human living, 
 our motives, purposes and beliefs have found expression in 
 institutions, — those concerted modes of procedure by 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 47 
 
 which we work together, — a student should be made 
 acquainted with these. He should see and appreciate 
 what is intended, what accomplished, and what left undone 
 by such institutions as property, the courts, the family, 
 the church, the mill. To know these as contributing and 
 failing to contribute to human welfare is the work of our 
 social or humanistic sciences, into which a boy must go on 
 his way through the liberal college. Thirdly, in order to 
 understand the motives and the institutions of human life 
 one must know the conditions which surround it, the stage 
 on which the game is played. To give this information is 
 the business of astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, 
 biology and the other sciences of nature. These a boy 
 must know, so far as they are significant and relevant to his 
 purpose. Fourthly, as all three of these factors, the mo- 
 tives, the institutions, the natural processes have sprung 
 from the past and have come to be what they are by change 
 upon change in the process of time, the student of human 
 life must try to learn the sequence of events from which the 
 present has come. The development of human thought 
 and attitude, the development of human institutions, the 
 development of the world and of the beings about us — 
 all these must be known, as throwing light upon present 
 problems, present instrumentalities, present opportunities 
 in the life of human endeavor. And in addition to these 
 four studies which render human "experience in terms of 
 abstract ideas, a liberal education must take account of 
 those concrete representations of life which are given in 
 the arts, and especially in the art of literature. It is well 
 that a boy should be acquainted with his world not simply 
 as expressed by the principles of knowledge but also as 
 depicted by the artist with all the vividness and definiteness 
 which are possible in the portrayal of individual beings 
 in individual relationships. These five elements, then, a 
 young man must take from a college of liberal training, the 
 contributions of philosophy, of humanistic science, of natural 
 science, of history, and of literature. So far as knowledge 
 
48 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 is concerned, these at least he should have, welded together 
 in some kind of interpretation of his own experience and 
 of the world in which he lives. 
 
 My second suggestion is that our college curriculum 
 should be so arranged and our instruction so devised that 
 its vital connection with the living of men should be obvious 
 even to an undergraduate. A little while ago I heard one 
 of the most prominent citizens of this country speaking 
 of his college days, and he said, "I remember so vividly 
 those few occasions on which the professor would put 
 aside the books and talk like a real man about real things." 
 Oh, the bitterness of those words to the teacher! Our 
 books are not dealing with the real things, and for the most 
 part we are not real men either, but just old fogies and 
 bookworms! And to be perfectly frank_about the whole 
 matter, I believe that in large measure our pupils are in- 
 different to their studies simply because they do not see 
 that these are important. 
 
 But if we really have a vital course of study to present 
 this difficulty can in large measure be overcome. It 
 is possible to make a Freshman realize the need of trans- 
 lating his experience from the forms of feeling to those 
 of ideas. He can and he ought to be shown that now, 
 his days of mere tutelage being over, it is time for him 
 to face the problems of his people, to begin to think 
 about those problems for himself, to learn what other men 
 have learned and thought before him, in a word, to get 
 himself ready to take his place among those who are re- 
 sponsible for the guidance of our common life by ideas and 
 principles and purposes. If this could be done, I think 
 we should get from the reality-loving American boy some- 
 thing like an intellectual enthusiasm, something of the 
 spirit that comes when he plays a game that seems to him 
 really worth playing. But I do not believe that this result 
 can be achieved without a radical reversal of the arrange- 
 ment of the college curriculum. I should like to see every 
 freshman at once plunged into the problems of philosophy, 
 
WHAT THE LIBERAL COLLEGE IS 49 
 
 into the difficulties and perplexities about our institutions, 
 into the scientific accounts of the world especially as they 
 bear on human life, into the portrayals of human experience 
 which are given by the masters of literature. If this were 
 done by proper teaching, it seems to me the boy's college 
 course would at once take on significance for him; he would 
 understand what he is about; and though he would be a 
 sadly puzzled boy at the end of the first year, he would 
 still have before him three good years of study, of investi- 
 gation, of reflection, and of discipleship, in which to achieve, 
 so far as may be, the task to which he has been set. Let 
 him once feel the problems of the present, and his historical 
 studies will become significant; let him know what other 
 men have discovered and thought about his problems, 
 and he will be ready to deal with them himself. But in 
 any case, the whole college course will be unified and domi- 
 nated by a single interest, a single purpose, — that of so 
 , understanding human life as to be ready and equipped for 
 the practice of it. And this would mean for the college, 
 not another seeking of the way of quick returns, but rather 
 an escape from aimless wanderings in the mere by-paths 
 of knowledge, a resolute climbing on the high road to a 
 unified grasp upon human experience. 
 
 VI 
 
 I have taken so much of your time this morning that an 
 apology seems due for the things I have omitted to mention. 
 I have said nothing of the organization of the college, 
 nothing of the social life of the students, nothing of the 
 relations with the alumni, nothing of the needs and quali- 
 fications of the teachers, and even within the consideration 
 of the course of study, nothing of the value of specialization 
 or of the disciplinary subjects or of the training in language 
 and expression. And I have put these aside deliberately, 
 for the sake of a cause which is greater than any of them — 
 a cause which lies at the very heart of the liberal college. 
 
50 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 It is the cause of making clear to the American people the 
 mission of the teacher, of convincing them of the value of 
 knowledge: not the specialized knowledge which contributes 
 to immediate practical aims, but the unified understanding 
 which is Insight. 
 
Ill 
 
 WHAT DOES THE COLLEGE PREPARE FOR 
 
 COLLEGE education, like all other genuine education, 
 is of course practical. It is preparation. Its under- 
 lying principle is very simple. Young people are to be 
 called upon later to carry on certain activities. The purpose 
 of the preparation is to bring it about that those activities 
 will be better done than they would have been if the prepa- 
 ration had not been given. If in any case it can be shown 
 that a student is not thus made ready for better doing, if it 
 appears that the graduates of a school are not more suc- 
 cessful than they would have been had they not attended 
 the school, then study and school are alike condemned and 
 should be discarded. School and college are both to be 
 judged by practical standards. 
 
 But what are the activities in which students may be 
 expected to engage, for which they should be prepared? 
 In relation to the goods, the possessions of life they fall 
 into three groups. If our education prepares properly 
 for each of these then it is socially justified. 
 
 The classification suggested above is obvious enough. 
 First, men are making goods, making things which they 
 want. Second, they are distributing these goods, are 
 assigning to each man his share of them. And third, they 
 are using goods, each man the share which falls to his lot. 
 
 For example, men take the forces, the stuff of the material 
 world and of human nature, and by processes of cultivation 
 and of manufacture, make out of these books, trees, fruits, 
 sermons, songs, boats, shoes, railways, tennis racquets — 
 all the multitudinous things which taken together become 
 the common stock of human possessions. Again, men build 
 
 51 
 
52 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 up ways of distributing these possessions, of determining 
 to whom each bit of value shall go to be kept as his own. 
 Thus we have the customs of rent and wages and property 
 and courts and inheritance and taxes and all the rest of our 
 machinery of social justice. And finally each man in his 
 own way uses what he has for such purposes as he thinks 
 best. He reads books, or puts them up for decoration; 
 he listens to sermons, sails a boat, travels in a train, swings 
 a tennis racquet, lies under the shade of a tree, sips the 
 juice of a fruit, in general makes of what he has what he 
 wants in the way of experience. 
 
 Now it is these three sets of activities for which our 
 schools and colleges are making young people ready. We 
 want manufacturing and growing better done; we want 
 distributing better done; we want using better done. If 
 these ends be accomplished then our teaching plays its 
 proper part in social and individual living; if not, it fails 
 to play its part. 
 
 As a teacher surveys these three sets of activities with 
 which his work is concerned, two observations will readily 
 occur to him — two judgments of comparison. He may 
 ask first as to the relative importance of the three tasks 
 assigned, and second, as to their relative difficulty. In 
 both cases he will find, I think, an ascending scale running 
 from manufacture, through distribution, to use, an ascend- 
 ing scale of importance and of difficulty. 
 
 The comparison as to importance is rather hard to put 
 into a form which will stand the test of criticism. To ask 
 whether the making or distributing or the using of wealth 
 is the most important is dangerously like inquiring whether 
 chickens precede eggs, or eggs chickens. Obviously enough, 
 all three activities are essential. There is not much to be 
 gained by making things if they are not to be given to any 
 one, nor much gained by giving them if they are not used. 
 But they cannot be used unless they are given, nor can they 
 be given unless they are made. To distinguish relative 
 values in this realm seems like comparing white and black 
 
WHAT DOES THE COLLEGE PREPARE FOR 53 
 
 crows in the dark. And yet there is a certain sense in which 
 the using of value is more fundamental than either making 
 or distributing it. In a very real sense, using is human 
 life itself, it is the human experience for the sake of which 
 the other activities are carried on. To use what we have 
 is the very process of living; to that end all other acts 
 are merely contributory; they are its instruments and 
 machinery. 
 
 The differences as to difficulty are much more readily 
 perceived. Relatively manufacture, the production of 
 goods, is an easy task for men. It is easy in the sense that 
 we master it with ease. This does not mean that we are 
 not called by it to strenuous endeavors. It does mean that 
 our endeavors are successful. What we do in this field 
 pays quickly and surely in terms of results. The last cen- 
 tury has seen such a developing control of the processes 
 of manufacture and growth that our wealth has increased 
 by leaps and bounds. The technical processes which have 
 been devised by the application of natural science to the 
 accomplishment of human purposes have so enlarged our 
 productive power that as compared with our fathers and 
 grandfathers we roll in wealth and in the assurance of 
 greater wealth in the future. Relatively speaking, we have 
 the processes of the production of wealth in hand. 
 
 In the distribution of wealth we are not so successful. 
 The world is torn with conflicting theories as to how this 
 should be done. Men are quarreling as to the possession 
 of goods. Nations quarrel with nations, individuals with 
 individuals, and we do not easily find a basis for the settle- 
 ment of these quarrels. 
 
 In a country driven mad by injustice and tyranny, men 
 have escaped from their bonds and are wildly seeking to 
 formulate and to put into action principles of distribution 
 subversive of all that men in other countries have counted 
 secure and essential. In safer countries where the pressure 
 is not so severe, men are in dread lest it may become so 
 and are forming into parties which view each other with 
 
54 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 hostile eye and with stealthy suspicion. Here we find the 
 men who believe that whatever has been is right. They 
 hold to the view that to their grandfathers a scheme of 
 social justice was revealed by splendid intuition and that 
 he who would depart from this is a traitor and a thief. 
 To such men the cries of the madmen in the country which 
 has found release are so dreadful that they must stop their 
 ears, nay, must stop the ears of their fellow-countrymen 
 as well. These two groups are the extremists with respect 
 to social justice — the men who would break our present 
 scheme to pieces and start anew and those who hold that 
 scheme so sacred that the suggestion of changing it is not 
 simply false but also vicious and sacrilegious. Between 
 these two are most of us, men who try to have patience and 
 common sense, but who are sadly puzzled and perplexed 
 just now. One thing we know, namely, that the way is not 
 clear, old procedures are not surely right, old answers 
 cannot be accepted without question. The world is seek- 
 ing wisdom as to social justice in distribution, and that 
 wisdom is hard to get. 
 
 But more difficult yet than the distributing of values is 
 the human task of using them. And the most serious as- 
 pect of the difficulty is that we do not feel it. We may be 
 baffled by the problems of social justice but at least we are 
 interested in them. In a college community as well as in a 
 public forum men can be stirred to eager and desperate 
 activity by the perception that other men are not being fairly 
 treated, that human beings are being robbed of a fair chance 
 at the opportunities of living. We may not know what 
 to do but our impulse is generous and our will resolute to 
 do something, if only the mind would tell us what it is. 
 But in the realm of use, in apprehension of the necessity 
 of taste and insight and appreciation of value, we are hardly 
 conscious of difficulty at all. We have a certain blind 
 faith that if only the opportunities of life are given they 
 will be taken and human lives will be in general what they 
 ought to be. Nothing could be more obvious than the 
 
WHAT DOES THE COLLEGE PREPARE FOR 55 
 
 falseness of such a faith as this. Wealth has not very 
 generally brought to those who have it the fineness of taste 
 and the niceness of discrimination which the use of it de- 
 mands. Quite as often it has brought coarseness of feeling 
 and dullness of appreciation. Our civilization does not 
 very clearly become more fine as it becomes more rich. 
 We are in danger of having the world in our hands and 
 losing it because our fingers slip. What shall we do with 
 the world which is given us ? That is, I think, the hardest 
 lesson which the teacher has to learn and teach. 
 
 Here then, are the three tasks of the teacher. How 
 do they bear upon the work of the liberal college? In a 
 broad general way it is true that the teaching of the pro- 
 duction of value rests with the technical and professional 
 schools. They are engaged in devising ways of making 
 goods. And again may we say that relatively speaking 
 their task is an easy one. The liberal schools, on the 
 other hand, are concerned with both the second and the 
 third endeavors. They are expected to inform our people 
 as to how the goods of life should be shared and how they 
 should be used. These are the two fundamental aims of 
 liberal teaching. 
 
 In the remainder of this paper I should like to press upon 
 the college the claims of the third of these tasks as against 
 a constant over-emphasis of the second. And may I pro- 
 test that this is not because one loves the second less but 
 rather because one loves the third more. It would perhaps 
 be truer to say that the second without the third is nothing 
 and that therefore love for it demands that we leave it no 
 longer bereft of its fellow. If only we can show that the 
 notion of social justice is not a complete account of life, 
 that it needs the supplementation of this third conception, 
 then perhaps in homes and churches and schools and col- 
 leges we may get a wiser and saner teaching of life than is 
 now given. Let us then condemn and vilify the ideal of 
 social justice in order to bring its adherents to their senses. 
 
 The point at issue was brought to clear formulation in 
 
56 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 a public discussion in which the writer of this paper took 
 part a few years ago. The first of two speakers said, "I 
 would not give a snap of my finger for a scheme of education 
 which does not find its final term of value in Service." 
 To which the second speaker replied, "I would not give 
 a snap of my finger for a scheme of education or of life 
 which does find its final term of value in Service." Such 
 statements as these have all the exaggeration of public 
 controversy but carefully considered they define an issue 
 which demands the attention of the liberal teacher. 
 
 Strictly speaking it seems to me clear that the second of 
 the above statements is right. Service, as such, is not a 
 term of value at all. To give to another is valuable only 
 in a secondary and derivative sense, never in a final one. 
 It is the thing given which is of value. There is nothing 
 gained by giving to another something which is not worth 
 giving. To serve one's fellows is to give to them what 
 they need, what they enjoy, what is worth while. And if 
 one is in search of the final term by which all our activities 
 and all our teaching are to be justified we must find it among 
 those things the having of which is good and the lack of 
 which robs human living of its value. To serve is to give 
 something and service is good only in so far as that some- 
 thing given is good. 
 
 At the risk of seeming flippant and unfair I should like 
 to press this point home by a number of statements which 
 though they are only half-truths are yet needed because 
 the other half is so constantly torn away from its fellow 
 and kept before our students as if it were the total and the 
 sufficient truth. 
 
 Much of the teaching and preaching which our students 
 hear is far too self-centered in its emphasis upon social 
 justice and upon the duty of service. After all, the essential 
 thing is not that we should make the world right, but that 
 it should be right. One often feels that some of our youth- 
 ful enthusiasts are haunted by the dreadful fear that there 
 may be no sinners for them to save, no broken lives for them 
 
WHAT DOES THE COLLEGE PREPARE FOR 57 
 
 to put together again. As against this one must protest 
 that in the last analysis the receiving of value does as much 
 for human living as does the giving of it. If for no other 
 reason, this is true because after all no one can give unless 
 there is some one who will take his gift. And if the taking 
 be not good, then the giving, whose final justification lies 
 within it, cannot be good either. Clearly enough, in the 
 grand total of human experience, giving cannot have more 
 value than the taking and using of the thing given. If it 
 be not good to use then it is not good to give the thing 
 used. 
 
 And from another point of view, the determination to 
 serve one's fellows needs to be kept clear in mind so that 
 it may be successful. It is well enough for youthful en- 
 thusiasts to go out with the determination to make a hun- 
 dred men happy, to make a hundred lives worth while. 
 But simple arithmetical calculation assures us that such 
 expectations will not be realized. On the average one 
 man cannot make more than one life worth while, for the 
 obvious reason that somebody must have the life which is 
 so practiced upon. If we base our calculation upon "wel- 
 fares" as the term of measurement, and say that each man 
 would like to make as many welfares as possible, the hard 
 fact remains that on the average we cannot each make more 
 than one of them. A welfare must belong to somebody 
 and if there were actually created more welfares than men, 
 the trouble would be that there would not be enough men 
 to take them. There is no danger of course of such a 
 calamity as this. Human life hardly furnishes us on the 
 whole with half a welfare apiece. But there is danger 
 that our young people misconstrue their task, state it to 
 themselves in exaggerated sentimental terms and so doom 
 themselves to the disappointment and sense of futility 
 which come when idle dreams collapse. 
 
 From still another point of view, one is here protesting 
 against the externalism of our social teaching. We teach 
 too much about the machinery of life and far too little 
 
58 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 about life itself. We tell too much about the things which 
 may be done and too little about what they are done for. 
 As a people we have immense admiration for a man who 
 builds a great library and profound disdain for a man who 
 sits down quietly in the library to read a book. What is 
 he doing there, we ask. Of what use is the reading of the 
 book? What will it enable him to do? And if one answers 
 that he reads because reading a good book is a good human 
 experience and that therefore it may be done not for the 
 sake of something else but for its own sake, practical men 
 think that we have gone mad. But again, let us protest 
 that if reading is not good then the building of the library 
 was not good, and our benefactor is not good and nothing 
 has been accomplished by all that he has given and done. 
 If there are not values in life then doing has no value and 
 the builder and the dreamer go down together in a common 
 crash. 
 
 The same principle holds on other sides of our life. We 
 admire men who can write books and men who can paint 
 pictures. Such men seem to us to have succeeded — if 
 someone else tells us that their work is highly regarded. 
 But we as a people are robbing both writers and painters 
 of their proper success because we do not give them readers 
 and seers who can appreciate, who can take the meaning, 
 the beauty which they give. It is true that we pay them 
 money for their efforts, but it is also true that we say "Ah " 
 in the wrong place, that we are thrilled by the vulgar and 
 stupid thing and left cold by the beauty into which the 
 spirit of the artist has poured itself. There is no surer 
 way of killing artists and writers than to be stupid and 
 dull in the presence of what they have created. For such 
 murders a wealthy crass civilization has a heavy burden 
 of guilt to bear. 
 
 What then shall the liberal teacher teach as the represen- 
 tation of the learning which seeks to know what life may 
 be? Shall he forbid men to serve their fellows? We have 
 not said that. To say that in colleges men preach service 
 
WHAT DOES THE COLLEGE PREPARE FOR 59 
 
 badly is not to say that in human society we have too much 
 generous friendship. We have far too little of it. By 
 every means in our power we must build it up so that in 
 the sharing of the goods of life men may act toward one 
 another like friends and fellows rather than like competing 
 beasts, each struggling for the plunder which strength and 
 cunning will enable him to take from other men. College 
 students, like other men, must learn how values should be 
 shared and then must pledge themselves to see to it that 
 justice is done, nay rather must be as eager that other 
 men shall have the values which they crave as that the 
 goods they wish should come to them. 
 
 But still the point holds good that all such eagerness as 
 this will come to little unless the man who gives and he 
 who takes have taste for life. There is the final test of 
 value. There is the point where all our strivings succeed 
 or fail. 
 
 Can college teachers teach that lesson? Perhaps they 
 can if they have learned it. But they will find a hundred 
 other teaching powers outside the college fighting against 
 them. What shall they do? It seems to me that first 
 they should remain apart from the machinery of life, re- 
 fusing to be busy with it. And second they should with 
 very steady eyes survey the goods which life affords, should 
 try to see what life may be in terms of its experiences, 
 should make a list of books, and trees, and songs, and 
 friends, and games, and arguments, and all the other 
 splendid things that men can use. And third they should be 
 sensitive themselves, discerning what is fine and true and 
 generous and permanent, and cutting it ofF with sharp, 
 clear-cut avoidance from the vulgar, false, selfish and 
 transitory things that cheapen life. And finally, having 
 some taste and insight, they should teach them to their 
 pupils, in whatever ways teaching may be done. 
 
 There is no one in all our social scheme more ambitious 
 than is the teacher. He is making the mind of his pupil 
 so that it may be fitted to the world in which he lives. 
 
60 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 Knowledge and skill must be developed for the making 
 of wealth; wisdom and fairness must be established for 
 the distributing and sharing of wealth. But above all, and 
 as the end of all, taste and sensitiveness and fineness and 
 intensity of appreciation must be built up, so that our 
 wealth may be worth giving and worth having. 
 
 
H 
 
 IV 
 
 MAKING THE MIND OF A NATION 
 
 AS this nation a mind ? I fear not. A mind has unity 
 or at least seeks to have it. Perhaps better, a mind 
 is unity in action. A mind is an activity which gath- 
 ers up disconnected opinions, impulses, theories and brings 
 them into order. Ideas, if they are within the same mind, 
 have relations to one another, are responsible each to the 
 other. They may not live in isolation, nor even in little separ- 
 ate clusters. The mind whose the]/ are, demands that they 
 be one in spirit and in truth. This craving, this zest for 
 unity is the very essence of a life of thought. Only so far 
 as a man expresses it can he be said to live as an individual 
 mind at all. Without it or with little expression of it he is 
 a bundle of things, a group, a mass, a welter of conscious 
 processes. With it he is a human spirit. Just so it is 
 with the thinking of a nation. If there are within it many 
 separate streams of impulse, of opinion, of prejudice, of 
 information, of doubt, or of dogmatism; if these do not know 
 each other; if they have not taken as a common hope 
 the goal of mutual acquaintance and understanding, the 
 nation has no mind. It is a group or many groups. Its 
 life is incoherence and its fate is that which incoherence 
 gives — the life of those who know not what they do nor 
 see the way they go-. 
 
 For many reasons we as a people are now failing to 
 achieve intellectual unity. People from many separate 
 and different races have been poured into our ranks. Our 
 own national tradition of individualism has unfitted us for 
 the breaking down of barriers. The splitting up of knowl- 
 edge and of life into separate compartments, — sciences, 
 
 61 
 
62 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 arts, trades, professions — this has sundered many of the 
 connections of earlier days. We are not dull, and yet as 
 a people we are not intelligent. Our minds are active, 
 keen, spirited, determined, each in its special sphere. The 
 separate things we do are done with skill and energy. And 
 yet we, as a people, have not a mind. Our common life 
 rises very little above the level of the mob, the crowd — 
 which feels but does not think; which does not judge but 
 follows changing impulse and caprice. Perhaps we are as 
 yet too young to have a mind. Perhaps we grow too fast 
 to keep ourselves in mind. 
 
 But now whither shall we turn to seek the making of a 
 mind: To whom shall we go for judging of our separate 
 interests, for understanding of our follies, conserving our 
 truths, cooling our passions, questioning our dogmas, 
 criticising our thoughts. Where, in our social scheme, is 
 judgment to be found? What is the nervous center of our 
 lifer Where is the place of understanding: Is the place 
 of judgment to be found in the newspaper? I fear that we 
 do not so regard that institution. Do we not rather think 
 of it as partisan, as special pleader, as used to represent a 
 cause, rather than as judge or critic, assigning to every* case 
 its proper value and significance? This common judg- 
 ment upon editor and news collector may not be true, but yet 
 we make it, and so long as it is made, the newspaper cannot 
 be a center for our common thinking. Xor can the maga- 
 zine or book perform the service. We do not use them in 
 this way; we do not read enough of things worth reading 
 to make a common understanding. Xor for another set 
 of reasons can the home, the many homes, nor yet the 
 church, the many separate, unrelated churches, furnish the 
 thing we need. Xo one of these commands our thinking 
 as a whole. And even less are our public men equipped 
 for bringing our thinking under their control. More even 
 than the newspaper, they too are talked about as advocates 
 of parties, interests, sections, creeds, rather than as the 
 guides whom we may trust to lead us. And when they 
 
MAKING THE MIND OF A NATION 63 
 
 come before us discussing public policy, we are as often 
 busy in peddling gossip behind their backs, in talking 
 scandal and petty spite, as in listening to their words, 
 discussing their thoughts, weighing their arguments, con- 
 sidering the nation's policy. Perhaps they are at fault; 
 perhaps their hearers; more likely they and we are both at 
 fault. However that may be, they do not lead us in trying 
 to understand a nation's life in fair and generous meeting 
 of opinion; they do not master us in shaping a nation's 
 mind, 
 
 Where then shall we go to find the place of understanding, 
 where plead that judgment may be given upon the issues 
 of our common life? More than any other institution, it 
 seems to me, the school and college must assume the task. 
 And especially the liberal college must endeavor to become 
 the place where mind is made and molded. The liberal 
 college is a place where we are trying to gather up the 
 elements of life, — moral, aesthetic, religious, political, in- 
 dustrial, social, — are trying to bring these together so 
 that men may understand them. Out of this stuff, this 
 content of experience, the college tries to make a single 
 thing, a meaning, a scheme of life, an interpretation of what 
 men are and may become. Just that and nothing else 
 is what the college of liberal arts intends to do. With that 
 accomplished, it succeeds according to the measure of the 
 accomplishment. With that neglected or not done, what- 
 ever else it may achieve, no institution is a college. Call 
 it whatever else you please, a school for boys, a country 
 club, a factory for making tools for industry, an idler's 
 paradise, a shop for grinding gerunds, a rag-bag store house 
 for ill-assorted facts — these are not colleges. To be a 
 place of understanding, to fashion minds \for men, to make 
 a nation's mind, that is the aim that leads us on. 
 
 Of course, to gaze at such a goal as this is dreaming; 
 of course, one knows that such a vision will never be made 
 true. But these are days for daring deeds that cannot be 
 done. And colleges are always young enough in spirit to 
 
64 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 follow the roads that never corne to endings. The task 
 cannot be done but still it must be done. To make a 
 nation's mind, — to help in making it, perhaps to lead the 
 way — that is the task for every one of us, trustee and 
 teacher, graduate and undergraduate alike. This nation 
 has so great a part to play that it must know its lines. And 
 we must read the play, assign the parts and make them 
 altogether into one. We must not be a mob, a crowd, 
 our speech an incoherent clash and clatter of unrelated 
 groans, and shouts and yells. This nation, like an in- 
 dividual mind, must seek to understand itself, to feel, to 
 will, to appreciate the part it has to play, must play its 
 part with understanding. And we within that part must 
 try to make our lines stand out vivid and clear, This 
 nation needs a mind with which to play its part. The 
 college must know the play and make the mind, the minds, 
 which shall interpret and express it. 
 
PART II 
 THE PARTICIPANTS IN THE PROCESS 
 
 THE three papers which follow are given to a con- 
 sideration of the friends and supporters of the 
 college. Their relations to each other and their 
 relations to the college are regarded with somewhat anxious 
 eyes. 
 
 The first paper was given at the meeting of the Phi Beta 
 Kappa society of Harvard University, June 18, 1917. It 
 takes the motto of the society, "Learning at the Helm 
 of Life," as the governing ideal of the college. It sum- 
 mons trustees, teachers, presidents, graduates, and under- 
 graduates to give an account of their allegiance to that 
 ideal. 
 
 The second paper, "The Freedom of the College," ap- 
 peared in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 191 8. It is 
 concerned with the relationship between teaching and study 
 on the one hand and freedom of thought and speech on the 
 other. It finds freedom to be, both for college and for 
 teacher, primarily not a privilege but a duty. 
 
 The third paper was given at a meeting of the New Eng- 
 land Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools, 
 November 7, 191 4. It was one of a series of papers which 
 discussed the values of various factors in the life of the 
 college as a whole. This paper finds side by side with 
 the studies of the classroom, the Student Activities of the 
 community outside the classroom. It asks as to the proper 
 relationship between activities and studies. 
 
 65 
 
THE COLLEGE AS CRITIC 
 
 I COME to-day to talk with you about colleges. I have 
 not in mind Harvard, nor even Amherst — but just col- 
 leges in the large, especially American colleges. We shall 
 be concerned not with technical schools or professional schools 
 or even with universities, but with plain, old-fashioned 
 colleges of liberal culture. 
 
 I feel justified in presenting this theme to-day because 
 of the relationship between the society of Phi Beta Kappa 
 and the liberal college. I suppose a member of the society 
 may be defined as "a person who has been very successful 
 in a liberal college." To know one of these two institutions 
 is then to know the other. If we can know what a college 
 is and so what success in a college is, we may be able to tell 
 the members of Phi Beta Kappa just what they are. I am 
 sure they would be interested to know. But if, on the 
 other hand, they already know what they are and will tell 
 us, we may reverse the procedure. If what they have done 
 constitutes success in college life, and if they will tell us 
 what they have done, we then, knowing what success in 
 college is, may learn what a college intends to be and do. 
 That surely we should be interested to know. 
 
 As between these two procedures, courtesy would sug- 
 gest that we assume that the members of this society do 
 know what they are about. I propose, therefore, that we 
 take the society and its principles for granted, and that 
 from these as our starting-point we attempt to define the 
 nature of the college, its aims, and its problems. 
 
 What, then, is the society? Does it describe itself; 
 does it set forth its purpose and ideal? It flies a pennant, 
 
 66 
 
THE COLLEGE AS CRITIC 67 
 
 as you all know well. Those letters of its name are not 
 mere empty sounds. They mean a thought, <£iXocro<£ta 
 fiiov Kvfief)vTJTr)<s, which is, being translated, "Learning 
 at the helm of life." I love the figure which those words 
 suggest: the bark of life adventuring out into the open sea, 
 tossed by the waves which bear it up, driven by the winds, 
 carried by the currents, swinging with the tides, but ever 
 as it goes, with learning at the helm — learning which knows 
 the waves and watches them, learning which spies upon 
 the winds and turns the bark to use them, learning which 
 measures the currents and the tides and plays the winds 
 against them, learning which knows the port behind and 
 sees the port before, learning which does not fetch or carry, 
 which does not drive or batter, learning which sees and 
 guides — learning, the pilot, at the helm of life! 
 
 Yes, I think we know. The members of Phi Beta Kappa 
 are the men who fly that pennant. They have not all been 
 elected to the society, and perhaps some men have been 
 voted in who have never looked aloft to see the pennant 
 where it flies. But whether in or out, those are the men 
 of whom we talk to-day. These men have taken learning 
 as their guide. Let strength and custom bear them up 
 and carry them on, let feeling drive them forth, let mood 
 and circumstance divert their course, let yearnings sweep 
 them here and there, but yet they try to see, to know, 
 to understand, to tell whither they ought to go and how it 
 shall be done. Learning at the helm of life! I greet the 
 goodly fellowship of those who fly that flag. 
 
 But now what is a college? Why, it is that in which to 
 fly this flag is to succeed and to fly another, any other, is 
 to fail. A college is a place, a group, a comradeship of 
 those who follow learning as their guide and who welcome 
 others in the same pursuit. A college is a spirit, a way of 
 life, a manner of being; it is the will to see the way we go. 
 And we who set our bounds by fence and yard, by brick and 
 stone, credits and tests, books and degrees, what does the 
 college think of us? These days of strife are days when 
 
68 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 men must tell what flag they fly, what leader they obey, 
 what loyalty they own. I am inclined, therefore, as speaker 
 for the society of those who follow learning, to demand of 
 colleges that they present themselves and give account of 
 iwhat they have done and failed to do in striving for our 
 goal. 
 
 My proposal is that we summon to the bar of judgment 
 of this society those groups of men who call themselves the 
 sons and servants of Alma Mater. Let them appear in 
 turn, graduate, undergraduate, teacher, president, trustee, 
 benefactor, friend. Let each one come and we will see how 
 he comports himself in presence of the flag we raise. 
 
 And first, by rules of good procedure, I summon the 
 alumni. In the courts of moral judgment it has been 
 decreed of men and institutions that by their fruits they 
 shall be known. Let the college, then, bring forth its fruits, 
 those spirits which it has nourished and cultured; let us 
 see how good or bad they are. 
 
 And as the court prepares to hear the case, what is the 
 charge? It is a serious one. "Their heads have been 
 turned round; they who should look ahead are looking back; 
 the college, when it taught them, set them with eyes before 
 to see the way, but they have craned their necks until the 
 muscles are all awry; their eyes are looking backward. 
 And be it further said that they have done this thing be- 
 cause of love for us, though a mistaken love. They think 
 the college far behind them, an experience of their youth, 
 and so they look around. But it is far before, leading them 
 on, and they are missing it because their heads are turned. " 
 
 "But," the defense will urge, "this is a new and strange 
 demand. There is no law upon the statute-book that 
 specifies which way a college man shall hold his head. 
 Have we not done the things the college asked of us ? Have 
 we not loved it, worked for it, supported it, declared abroad 
 
THE COLLEGE AS CRITIC 69 
 
 that it is best of all the colleges the world has ever seen? 
 We should have thought that some sort of moral leprosy 
 had befallen any man who failed of this. Have we not 
 labored hard to serve the fortunes of the college? Have we 
 not arranged and sat through banquets, have we not can- 
 vassed the schools for boys to fill the ranks, have we not 
 formed committees and councils to make the college grow 
 and boom; have we not given our time and our money, 
 and planned that other men should give their money too?" 
 Yes, they have done these things; and college presidents, 
 whose hope it is to change the baser metals into gold, have 
 called them good. But in the judgment of the court we 
 hold to-day, that verdict must be modified. "These 
 things which you have done are good not in themselves but 
 only in so far as they express a loyalty which lies far deeper 
 than they go. These acts of kindness to the college would 
 seem to make of it a beggar to its children, a thing that 
 lives on alms, that cries aloud for bounty. But in the 
 deeper sense, the college is not poor but rich; she has 
 great wealth to give; and in the last resort the only thing 
 her sons can do for her is to take from her hands the riches 
 that she offers. To take, and not to give, is what she asks 
 her children. And he who fails to take from her and take 
 again, no matter what he does in outward act, is not her 
 own; she will have none of him." 
 
 But now another plea may come. "Of course," we shall 
 be told, "no one would ever measure loyalty in terms of 
 banquets and committees, gifts made and students found. 
 These are the incidentals of a man's affection for his college. 
 But the real test lies, as you say, in the use one makes of 
 what she gave him. He serves his college best who justi- 
 fies her training by the work he does. Let him go out and 
 make his place in the world. Let him succeed and do, 
 and men will give the glory to the college from which he 
 came." And so we count our graduates and study their 
 careers. We find among them doctors, lawyers, merchants, 
 ministers, teachers, and, if their work is good, we say, 
 
jo THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 "There is the proof; see what a college we have here; 
 you know it by its fruits indeed; its men have made their 
 marks in life; need any more be said?" 
 
 But here again the plea is only half a truth and cannot be 
 accepted for the whole. We are not trying at the bar a 
 school of business or a school of law, but a college of liberal 
 arts. We wish for evidence that those whom it has trained 
 have done its work, have not departed from its spirit. 
 What shall the evidence be; how shall we show that any 
 man has done the college work? I know no other test than 
 this — that man is loyal to a college who shares its interests, 
 does what it would do. If a college believes that biology 
 should be studied, no man can be a member of the college 
 unless he wants to know the truths biology has to tell. 
 If it be the purpose of a college to follow after learning, 
 whether it be science or philosophy, literature or art, no 
 man is of the college who has ceased from that pursuit. 
 What is the college for? Is it not this: to start men on the 
 way of learning? If you would know in this case or in that 
 whether or not philosophy has been well taught, I should 
 advise that you inquire whether or not the boys who learned 
 in college have kept on learning through their later years. 
 If economics be not studied by the graduates, it did but 
 little for the boys who listened to the talk or read about 
 it in the books. The college is a group of men who follow 
 after learning; if any man has ceased from this, I care not 
 how he may succeed in other things, he is not of the college. 
 
 There is a current theory implicit in the plea just made, 
 which we who judge to-day cannot accept and must con- 
 demn while now we have the chance. It is the theory 
 that what boys study in college makes no difference. "All 
 that is needed for a college education is that some subjects 
 shall be studied well, that proper method shall be gained, and 
 so the mind shall be well trained to meet the serious tasks 
 which wait it in the world." That theory has done so 
 much of harm in every way, the court with difficulty re- 
 strains itself within the bounds of proper language. The 
 
THE COLLEGE AS CRITIC 71 
 
 theory makes of literature and science, history and art, 
 not human interests and pursuits, but five-finger exercises 
 for children's discipline. It says to boys: "These are the 
 things we give to drill you in your plastic youthful years; 
 take them and do as you are told until the drilling has 
 been done; and then forget them when you have become 
 a man." 
 
 But as against this theory, I protest, the value of the 
 subjects taught in college is that they are the learning which 
 serves men as their guide. They are not play or drill for 
 children; they are the wisdom of the world gathered for 
 human life. They are not learned in four short years nor 
 yet in fourscore either. As against the counter-theory I 
 would declare, "No subject has a right within a college 
 course unless we may expect our boys who study it to keep 
 on studying it so long as they may live." I know the 
 statement is extreme and "subject" is a term that needs 
 to be defined. But I am crying out against a monstrous 
 thing, and so I cry aloud, forgetting for the moment the 
 presence of the court and the sobriety its laws demand. 
 
 But now to sum it up, what shall we say of college gradu- 
 ates? Are we to judge them good or bad? And still we 
 say, in spite of pleas, "not very good; their heads are 
 turned around." I fear they think of college as a place 
 in which their liberal studies reached an end, a place in 
 which to have one's taste of history and art, philosophy 
 and science, and then to put them aside except so far as 
 they may serve professional ends. The college is for them 
 too much a school for boys, a home of childish interests and 
 pursuits, — a thing which they may help, may serve, may 
 love, — the place from which they come to meet the world, 
 and yet essentially a place which they have left behind with 
 other boyhood things. But they are wrong. College is not 
 an ending but a commencement of a way of life. Here 
 men are not to cease from liberal study, but to find out 
 what it is. Here are revealed the vital interests of mankind 
 and so set forth that one may take them to himself, make 
 
72 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 them his own and follow where they lead. No, he who thinks 
 of college as a place to cease from learning, to get it done 
 with so that he may go to work, is all turned round. Good 
 fellow he may be, loyal and true, strong and efficient, and 
 yet the mother whom he loves yearns over him in vain, 
 because his eyes are seeking her where she is not. How 
 shall she make him turn and see her where she is? 
 
 ii 
 
 And now the undergraduate comes forth to face the court. 
 He is a clever lad, a very clever lad at meeting charges. 
 I know that well from many years of being a Dean. "What 
 do you say?" we ask him. And he replies, "Whatever 
 charge you make I will admit, and yet I am 'Not guilty.' 
 There may be something wrong with me but I am not to 
 blame." And if you do not catch him up he will go on with 
 counter-charge something like this: "I understand you 
 say I do not study. Whose fault is that? I study hard 
 enough at law or medicine or office desk. Why don't I 
 study hard with you? And why, I'd like to know, do so 
 many of my friends, four out of every ten who come to get 
 the training which you give, put it aside and, leaving college, 
 turn to other things that seem worth while? Oh, yes, 
 there's something wrong all right; but, it seems to me, 
 it's up to you, not me." What can one do in face of such 
 a counter-charge as this? The boy is right. We have not 
 even made him see that "wrong all right" is wrong, that 
 "up to you" is not a phrase to use in presence of the court 
 or Dean. But there the trouble lies. Somehow we have 
 not made him see. The court dismisses the defendant as 
 "guilty but not responsible," and as he goes he cocks an 
 eye and grins delightfully. "I knew you wouldn't get me," 
 he declares, "you'd better try the Faculty." 
 
 in 
 
 I must confess some hesitation in taking the step which 
 now awaits us. To summon the teacher to appear before 
 
THE COLLEGE AS CRITIC 73 
 
 the bar of judgment requires much courage: the thought 
 of it may make one tremble and shrink for fear of meeting 
 at some turn the ghost of Academic Freedom. But, 1 
 recall, it is not I who give the summons, but the society 
 that speaks through me. And so, leaning on one another, 
 we call the college teacher to appear. It may be he will 
 come. And if he does, let us go on. 
 
 "You are the man who made the graduate?" we ask. 
 "Yes," he replies, "I made him out of such stuff as was 
 provided me." "And are you satisfied with what you 
 have produced?" "Oh, no," he says, "the stuff was not 
 adapted to my purpose. You see, the boys who come to 
 college are not well fitted for the college work. There is 
 no learning in their homes, nor any love of it; there is no 
 genuine training in the schools; the social world from 
 which they come, to which they go, sets little value on the 
 scholarship we have to give, and so the boys have little 
 longing for it." "We understand you then to say, the work 
 is unsuccessful but you are not to blame?" "Yes, that is 
 it. When homes and schools and social life are better, I 
 shall do better work, but not till then." 
 
 >And shall we let him too escape, after the manner of the 
 undergraduate? No, he must stand and take responsibility. 
 There are not many things of which I am sure about a 
 college, but this I know — the teacher is the college in the 
 active sense; all other things are circumstance, machinery, 
 arrangements; he is the mind that learns and teaches; 
 if he does well, then all is well; if he does ill, the college is a 
 failure. 
 
 Admitting, then, that there are many evils of circum- 
 stance, what is our charge against the college teacher? 
 What does he fail to do that might be done to master cir- 
 cumstance? He seems to me to lack a proper sense of his 
 importance. He does not clearly realize the task he has 
 to do. He teaches subjects, studies, fields; he does not 
 lead men in following learning as the guide of life. May 
 I explain? 
 
74 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 If learning is to be the guide of life, it must be one, not 
 many. Learning is criticism; it is interpretation. And 
 criticism, what is that? It is the bringing together of 
 separate things to find out their relations. It is the calling 
 to account of this or that in terms of that or this. It is 
 the finding of principles that run through many separate 
 things and bind them together, making them one. Learn- 
 ing interprets; it takes the fragments of our life, our knowl- 
 edge, and makes of them a unity, a whole. Each bit, 
 by itself, is clear but meaningless. Learning interprets 
 them, gives them significance one for another, makes out 
 of them a scheme of life, a system of knowledge which one 
 can understand and use. Learning interprets, criticizes, 
 makes the many one. 
 
 But what of college teachers? Do they believe in learn- 
 ing? It seems to me that many of them believe much 
 more in subjects, believe in knowledge in the scattered 
 sense. Each one of them knows one field well, better than 
 any other member of his college does. This is his field 
 and here he speaks with high authority. But does he talk 
 of other fields as well? No, he had better not do that! 
 To speak of things that others know better than you is not 
 professionally wise. You may be wrong, and then where 
 are you? But if the teachers all do this, where are the 
 students? We in our wealth of knowing have split up 
 knowledge into* many hundred parts. Of these a teacher 
 takes some two or three. The undergraduate, by our laws, 
 takes five a semester, ten a year, and when in four years 
 he has taken forty of them, his work is done and he may 
 graduate. But does he understand the things he knows, 
 can he interpret them, make use of them in knowing life? 
 How shall he know his subjects in this way if they are 
 taught the other way? How shall his mind be liberalized 
 by minds whose law it is to know the special from the 
 special point of view? I wonder if our teachers do believe 
 in liberal training? 
 
 Is this a strange, nonsensical demand? I do not wish 
 
THE COLLEGE AS CRITIC 75 
 
 to be absurd nor yet to be misunderstood. But it seems 
 clear, terribly clear, to me that teachers in the colleges are 
 not commanding and dominating the spirits of their boys 
 because they have no purpose which has a proper claim 
 to domination. They can relate their subjects to the 
 trades, can show how botany will serve the grower of food, 
 how physics guides the engineer, how economics helps the 
 business man, and if a boy is looking to a trade, they grip 
 him hard and carry him away. Yet this is not the learning 
 that we seek, but only some fragments of it. Can they 
 interpret botany and food supply, physics and engineering, 
 economics and business, each for the others and each for 
 any other bit of knowledge that men have gained about the 
 world ? Can they bring all this knowledge into order, 
 reducing it to principles, making of it a knowing of the 
 world in which men live and of the human life itself? Can 
 they interpret what we know and make it all significant? 
 
 I know what men will say against this thing I urge. 
 How can a man know more than one field well? And if 
 one cannot, what is the value of making- judgments in a 
 realm you have not mastered, of trying to understand the 
 things you do not know? But what is the alternative? 
 Are men to be, so far as they may study at all, simply a 
 group of experts, each master in his field? And what of 
 those who do not specialize in any branch of knowledge? 
 Are they to have no intellectual life at all? Just as a 
 protest, I would define a liberally educated man as one 
 who tries to understand the whole of knowledge as well 
 as one man can. I know full well that every special judg-, 
 ment that he makes will be inadequate. I know the 
 experts have him on the hip, each expert at one point.. 
 But yet for human living as a whole, for living as men should 
 live, I'll match a liberally educated man against the field 
 of experts and have no fear that any one of them will beat 
 him. 
 
 Have we not tragic illustration of the principle to-day 
 in this great war which we have entered? Have we not 
 
76 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 seen a people which was the very centre of learning of the 
 world, beloved and honored for the knowledge that it gave, 
 have we not seen it let that knowledge fall asunder into 
 separate parts, the sciences and arts which make life merely 
 efficient? Have we not seen the generous, human view of 
 life which bound it to the world contract and split to special, 
 partial views that cut men off, and send them at each others' 
 throats to murder? And just the tragedy is this, — the 
 special view when taken by itself is so convincing and so 
 clear, so accurate, that if you take it as it stands it cannot 
 but be true; you must be ruthless in your disregard of all 
 things else. But meanwhile other men with other points 
 of view fully as clear are blind to you as you are blind to 
 them. And so men fight. But we have entered on the 
 war to put an end to fighting, not for a special interest of 
 our own, not for a private cause which we would serve, but 
 in the hope that men may come to understanding, may 
 find a way to know each other and to live in peace. 
 
 It seems to me we need to-day a Socrates to come again 
 as Socrates of old to Athens, to tell us that just as life is 
 one, so learning is one and every man should have it so far 
 as one man can. And then with Socrates we might inquire 
 how learning may be taught, and just like him might gather 
 young men round us to study the way of life. If that 
 should come again, we should have colleges as nowhere in 
 the world we have them now. 
 
 What, then, should teachers say to boys who come to 
 college? I think they should say this: "The college is a 
 place where men are studying human life, man and the 
 world in which he lives. We take it that your coming here 
 means that you join us in that enterprise, that you are eager 
 to understand what human living is and does." And if a 
 man outside should hear the words, I doubt not he would 
 sound a loud guffaw. "Oh ho/' he says, "you ask a boy 
 of eighteen years to master human life, to know it as a 
 whole; is this the thing that you would have him do in 
 college?" Yes, that is the thing he should do in college, 
 
THE COLLEGE AS CRITIC 77 
 
 should do so long as he may live; he will not finish it in 
 four short years, nor yet in fourscore either. But he may 
 join the brotherhood of those who fly the flag, who have put 
 learning at the helm of life. He may array himself with 
 men, wiser than he, who have labored long and are yet 
 laboring for the cause. He may join others, foolish like 
 himself, but who in joyful youth delight in doing things 
 that never can be done. He may feel kinship with the 
 older men who went before along the path and yet are 
 traveling it, with hope and fear, in the goodly company 
 of those who seek to see the wayand follow it. This, it 
 would seem to me, would be to go to^college. 
 
 What will the teacher answer to the verdict of the court ? 
 What will he say? If I have known his spirit there are two 
 answers he will make. First, "I cannot do this task; 
 it is too great." And second, "Shall I have a chance to 
 try it freely, with no one coercing or restraining me?" 
 
 And to the first the court replies: "Whether you can or 
 not, you must. No people can live and rule itself by its 
 own thought and will, no people can be free, unless it be 
 interpreted and criticized within itself. And if the college 
 cannot give such learning, then who can? You may not 
 shun the task. To you as critic and interpreter, all men 
 must come. To you the church, the state, the home, the 
 school, rich man and poor, the builder-up, the breaker- 
 down, each one must bring his thoughts, his hopes and 
 fears, his doubts and creeds, his strivings and opinions, 
 and you must show him what they are in terms of their 
 relations to others which his fellows bring. You must be 
 sane as other men are not; you must have knowledge 
 which others cannot gain; you must be fearless and honest 
 as others, tied by interest, may seldom be; you are the 
 student set apart to view the whole, to try to understand, 
 a free untrammeled human spirit seeking the truth for 
 guidance of mankind. And you must gather round you 
 younger men, young lads whose wits are keen, whose wills 
 are strong and spirits high, and set them to the task, must 
 
78 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 make them join with you in trying to think the problems 
 through, and then must send them forth to play their 
 parts in the activities of men and yet to follow learning 
 as their guide. You will not do it well; your heart will 
 break with disappointment and despair; and yet you will 
 keep on for very joy of it, because in doing this you make 
 a college, and that is what, as teacher, you are to do." 
 
 And now the second answer: "Shall you be free with no 
 one coercing or restraining you? Who would restrain 
 you?" "Why, any special point of view that thinks itself 
 the truth might try to hinder me. Perhaps the church, 
 perhaps the state, perhaps the home or school, perhaps 
 the radical who finds the world all wrong, or the conservative 
 who finds it right, — each one of these, thinking his own the 
 truth, may hate me for the other truths I hold beside his 
 own. And shall I yet be free to criticize, to seek the mean- 
 ing of the whole?" And still the court replies: "Of course 
 you shall; who could restrain you?" And then the secret 
 fear that lurks within the teacher's heart comes out. "Per- 
 haps the college might restrain me. Have you forgotten 
 that I am chosen and paid by other members of the college 
 group? I do not choose myself as teacher. I do not 
 decide whether or not I shall be kept, nor on what terms. 
 I am the servant of another group of men whose will is 
 law. Perhaps they might restrain me." 
 
 IV 
 
 It is quite clear the court must summon the trustee, to 
 ask of him the answer to the teacher's question. "Are 
 you the owner of the college?" "Yes, in the legal sense, 
 I am." "And who elected you to hold this place of power?" 
 "My fellow trustees." "And have you, as a group, the 
 power to choose the teachers, to fix their terms of service 
 and of compensation, to tell what subjects shall be taught 
 and how they shall be taught?" "We have." "And are 
 you as a group the representatives of all the different classes, 
 
THE COLLEGE AS CRITIC 79 
 
 interests, and parties within the social order, or are you very 
 much alike in point of view?" "We are, I think, a special 
 group, and being chosen by ourselves, we tend to keep 
 within a fairly limited point of view." "What then, we ask 
 of you, shall be our answer to the teacher's question? Is 
 he a free man in his work? May he have confidence that 
 in the task of bringing different points of view together 
 you will support him, and not demand that he give favor 
 to your own?" And here, I think, a trustee who is honest 
 and intelligent, will hesitate and qualify his answer. "We 
 are not paragons of wisdom," he will say; "we have our 
 frailties and our prejudices, our interests and our limitations, 
 and doubtless these have their effects upon the judgments 
 which we make about the business of the college. And 
 yet against this fact two others may be weighed. We are 
 trustees, not for the furthering of our interests, but for the 
 sake of education, because we wish to do whatever we can 
 to help the cause of learning. Again, although we are a 
 special group, we are upon the whole within the class of 
 those who hold the splendid human faith in freedom of 
 thought and speech, by which all higher civilizations have 
 been lifted up. You ask me whether or not the teacher 
 may be free, and I reply, 'Yes, that is our purpose, however 
 well or ill we may succeed in making it effective." 
 
 What, then, shall we say of the trustee? I think his plea 
 is good. He does not claim to do more than he can. In 
 the days gone by he has done splendid service for the col- 
 leges. And yet the method of self-election cannot remain 
 as a final form of college organization. A college is a place 
 of criticism. From this it follows that not even in the 
 legal sense can it be permanently owned by any special 
 self-selecting group of men. I am not raising here the 
 question of special interest or self-seeking. That issue 
 seems to me at present unimportant. I am not asking 
 how the personnel of boards of trustees may be improved. 
 I do not think that an}^ other method of choice would have 
 given us trustees so able or so well adapted to their work. 
 
8o THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 But the real issue is that of the intellectual leadership of a 
 people who believe that they believe in democracy. The 
 colleges cannot lead, as critics lead, unless the people trust 
 them. And in the field of thought, as in the realm of 
 politics, our people will not permanently follow leaders 
 whom others choose to guide them. The college as critic 
 must command the confidence of every one who comes 
 to it for judgment. It may not be of any party, any sect, 
 or any creed. It may not be committed to any interest, 
 any cause or any class. It must in some sense stand apart, 
 aloof; it must command the confidence of men. I think 
 that we have kept the present scheme of choosing our trus- 
 tees because there is no other group whose wisdom we could 
 trust to choose them. But we are on the road toward 
 giving this responsibility to the graduates. What charge 
 could be more terrible against the college than this — that 
 those whom it has trained, whom it sends out prepared to 
 care for other institutions cannot be trusted to take care 
 of it? However terrible the charge, I think it has so far 
 been true. But in the future, as we learn to do our work, 
 I think our graduates will be toward us more nearly what 
 they ought to be. I think their heads will be turned round 
 again, and as they go with us along the way we shall trust 
 them to take the fortunes of the college in their hands, to 
 keep it safe and free from harm. They have the will to 
 do it now, and we must add to this an understanding of 
 what the college is and what it wills to do. 
 
 But now the teacher speaks again: "What of the presi- 
 dent? You have not summoned him. His is the power 
 which all men fear." Then, let him come! What is the 
 charge? "He is too powerful. Through him trustees 
 must act and speak; by him teachers are recommended 
 for election; to his approval teachers must submit their 
 work; by him the college is explained abroad; to him 
 
THE COLLEGE AS CRITIC 81 
 
 come graduates seeking for information and offering advice; 
 he must be master of the college life; he, as the common 
 servant of them all, assumes to dominate the whole." This 
 is the charge. What does the culprit answer? We feel 
 his kinship with the undergraduate when once again we 
 hear the plea, "Guilty but not responsible." The president 
 is far more powerful than he ought to be. But just what 
 is his power? Is it not this, that he adjusts conflicting 
 interests? All about him are parties and causes, men who 
 cannot agree, and they demand some one to judge between 
 them. Trustees and donors, departments and faculty, 
 teachers and other teachers, alumni, old and young, serious 
 and gay, the undergraduate boy of every type and kind, — 
 each has his point of view, each has his special purpose, 
 each serves a cause. And all these forces surging in the 
 college must find some place of meeting, some point of 
 contact. That point of contact is the president. But all 
 the power he has comes from the forces round about him. 
 If they can understand each other; if they, amid their 
 separate points of view, can find the common purpose of 
 the college as a whole; if they are minded not so much 
 to urge the special cause as to advance the general cause of 
 learning, — just in so far as they do this, administrative 
 power will dwindle and fall away. I do not mean that 
 members of the college are selfishly pursuing separate 
 claims, but I do mean that we have fallen into a way of 
 doing college business that constantly increases presidential 
 power. I think this way of doing things has come upon 
 us quite inevitably, — and that because we have not been 
 content with studying and teaching; we have been growing 
 too. At times it seems as if that were our greater task. 
 More wealth has come, more books, more land, more 
 buildings, more prestige, more students, more courses, more 
 teachers, more of everything. And every member of the 
 college has been stirred by instincts of growth to claim his 
 share and use it. But I am daring to hope that for the 
 colleges at least the days of growth are nearly past, that we 
 
82 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 shall soon decide we have enough of things that men can 
 give, so much we cannot well take more. And when that 
 day does come, we may be quiet and peaceful, doing our 
 work. And when the day is here, I venture to predict 
 the president will lose much of his power, will take the 
 place he really ought to hold. During the time of growth 
 the struggling, fighting forces of the college life have torn 
 him from his proper place and hurled him aloft above the 
 heads of all. And they have kept him there by the sheer 
 pressure of their contacts from beneath. But in the hap- 
 pier days to come when conflicts cease, I hope he may 
 escape from his captivity, may come to earth to stand 
 among his peers, teacher and student as his fellows are, 
 officially, if you please, the chairman of the faculty. 
 
 You see the court predicts that in the coming years two 
 changes will take place in college organization — two 
 changes by absorption. Trustees, we think, will be ab- 
 sorbed by graduates, become their council, agents, repre- 
 sentatives. And presidents will be absorbed by faculties, 
 lions by lambs. And we shall have within the college walls 
 three groups, — teachers, their pupils, and the pupils they 
 have had before. Thus shall the teacher lose his fear of 
 interference from without, thus shall he be the college in 
 the active sense. 
 
 VI 
 
 The college as teacher! The teacher as critic and inter- 
 preter! That is thejword I bring to you to-day, the prin- 
 ciple that underlies all the deliberations of this our court. 
 Do we need teachers, scholars who stand aside to criticize 
 and to interpret us? Surely we do. We as a people are 
 embarked upon a fearsome enterprise. We have the thirst 
 for freedom on our lips, the zest for justice in our veins. 
 Do we need guidance as we venture forth? Never did 
 people need it more. And we must make it for ourselves; 
 freedom accepts no guidance from outside. We must put 
 learning at the helm of life. And who shall place and keep 
 
THE COLLEGE AS CRITIC 83 
 
 it there if not the colleges? I dream of college teachers 
 who shall be guides for all the thinking of our people — 
 men who shall watch the things we do, shall understand 
 them as the men engaged in them can never do, men whom 
 their fellows reverence and trust because they find them 
 intimate with truth — interpreters and critics of our com- 
 mon life. I would not have them run to every market- 
 place to shout their theories; I would not have them claimed 
 by any party, sect or creed; I would not have them try 
 to do the active work which active men can do with greater 
 skill than they. But I would have them at tHe helm of 
 life, looking before to see the way men go. And round them 
 here and there would gather boys to study with them and 
 to catch their spirit. And older men, knowing their teach- 
 ing, would come to talk with them and share their wisdom. 
 Thus, at this point and at that, would be a college, men 
 following a way of life, a life with learning at the helm. 
 
II 
 
 THE FREEDOM OF THE COLLEGE 
 
 THERE have been many disputes about freedom. And 
 there will be many more. It is a matter about which 
 men feel deeply. It has therefore been argued about 
 more than it has been studied. "Shall not a man be free to 
 think what he thinks and say what he thinks?" one group de- 
 mands. "What are you going to do with a fellow who has no 
 common sense?" retorts the other. And on the relations of 
 Liberty and License, especially as both names begin with Li, 
 there have been many passionate pronunciamentos. 
 
 We are apparently just entering on another phase of this 
 old conflict. It is presented very commonly in the head- 
 lines of our newspapers. "Another professor dismissed. 
 Teaching investigated and condemned. Faculty members 
 protest in vain. Trustees firm." The reader is given the 
 impression that a conflict is going on in the colleges, that 
 trustees and professors are arrayed in opposing camps. 
 It is understood that one party is demanding freedom of 
 thought and speech while the other is insisting upon com- 
 mon decency and common sense. And further, it is noted 
 that the two parties find their demands mutually hostile 
 and irreconcilable. Just why freedom and common sense 
 should be irreconcilable does not appear to the casual ob- 
 server, or perhaps appears only to him. And yet it is very 
 easily taken for granted that they are. And so the issue 
 is formulated. Trustees and professors are in conflict 
 about freedom of thought and speech. 
 
 Now if there be such a conflict within the college, it is 
 
THE FREEDOM OF THE COLLEGE 85 
 
 not to be avoided. It would be well to have it out, and that 
 quickly. I should like, in this paper, to contribute, so far 
 as I may, to the "having it out." I do not expect to end the 
 controversy. My purpose is rather to find out whether or 
 not there is one, and if so what it is, Especially I should 
 like to know just what it is that the professor wants and that 
 the trustee is said to be unwilling he should have. What is 
 academic freedom? 
 
 In the first place, what kind of a thing is it ? Is it a right, 
 or a duty, or an obligation, or a privilege, or a perquisite, 
 or what is it? Is it something which the professor wants 
 for his own private satisfaction? That would make it a 
 perquisite or a privilege. And we should have the very 
 natural question, "Why may not other people have the 
 same freedom which the professors claim?" But the ques- 
 tion which we really ask on this plane is just the opposite 
 one. The question is, whether the professor may have the 
 same degree of freedom as other men have; whether, 
 because of his peculiar responsibilities, he ought not to be 
 specially limited in thought and speech. There are, we all 
 know, dangers with professors. There is always the danger 
 that some one will take a professor seriously; and so it may 
 be necessary to take care what he says. And it is also 
 possible that his thinking may carry him along one of the 
 roads that thought travels, that he may really get some- 
 where else; therefore there may be need of prescribing 
 whither he shall and shall not go. These are dangers which 
 mark him off from the common run of men. And so the 
 question on this level is, to what degree the professor should 
 be denied this privilege of freedom of thought and speech 
 which a democracy normally allows its citizens. 
 
 But freedom as a privilege is not fundamental. The duty 
 or obligation to be free is the essential thing. I take it 
 that the community is so related to the college and the 
 college so related to the professor, that the community 
 makes a demand upon the college with regard to the pro- 
 fessor. It says, "I demand of you that for the sake of my 
 
86 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 welfare you see to it that the study of my scholars and 
 the learning of my children be free." And the duty, the 
 obligation, of the professor is to the college just as the 
 obligation of the college is to the community. In order 
 do to its service, he must be free; he is a trickster and a 
 fraud if he is not free. When he speaks of freedom, he is 
 not playing with his own perquisites and possessions; he is 
 facing his master and the commands of his duty are upon 
 him. 
 
 The essential principle in the doctrine of academic freedom 
 as a duty may, I think, be stated in this way. Most men, 
 outside our institutions of learning, having the choice be- 
 tween freedom and non-freedom of thought and speech, 
 choose the privilege of the latter. They prefer not to be 
 free. It is for this reason that they demand that the man 
 within the college shall adopt the former. To explain this 
 statement, I must try to explain what colleges are for. 
 If we can understand this, I think we may get a grip on 
 academic freedom. May I therefore try to describe the 
 mission of the college with regard to human opinions and 
 judgments? 
 
 Every one knows, or may know if he stops to think about 
 it, that his opinions, the judgments which he believes, are 
 not very good, are not so true as they might be. "Mine 
 own they are," we say, "but poor things." In the realm 
 of politics, for example, we all have opinions and act upon 
 them, but we know that we do not know very much about 
 politics, and further that, if we did know more, we could 
 make better opinions. And the men who differ from us, 
 as well as those who agree with us, are in like situation. 
 They too are doing each his best, and yet it is not very 
 good. Our judgments upon politics, yours and mine, are 
 rather poor things; they are not very true; for reasons of our 
 own we claim the privilege of holding opinions, of believing 
 them, of acting on them, even though we know that as 
 opinions they are no better intellectually than are we who 
 make them. 
 
THE FREEDOM OF THE COLLEGE 87 
 
 There are two ways in which this unsatisfactoriness of 
 our opinions is brought home to us, and each of them seems 
 to me to reveal the need of colleges which are free. 
 
 The more obvious bit of evidence about the quality of 
 our opinions is that our neighbors think less highly of them 
 than we do ourselves; in fact, they contradict them. And 
 these contradictions come, not only from our equals in 
 intelligence, but also from our superiors. I may believe 
 in Social Cooperation, but my neighbor holds fast to In- 
 dividualism. And on the whole he seems to be as good a 
 mind as I. In other words, I think that my opinion is 
 true, but just as good a mind as mine thinks it is not. That 
 makes the chances even that I am wrong. But worse and 
 more disturbing than our equals are our superiors, the 
 better men who differ from us. No matter what opinion 
 we hold, we know that other minds, better informed and 
 better trained than ours, can make a better. And so, 
 however brave a face we put on it, we know that our su- 
 periors, the men whose mental fibre is stronger and more 
 delicate, can think their way to better thoughts than ours. 
 I feel sure that this awareness of our ineptitude, this knowl- 
 edge of our ignorance, is one of the reasons why we build 
 colleges. 
 
 The second and more disturbing observation about our 
 beliefs is that of their connection with our interests. Here 
 again, not in a conscious way, but none the less effectively, 
 we seem to have chosen not to be free. Men seem to think 
 by classes, and thoughts to express desires and needs rather 
 than facts. We do not like the story that when the Con- 
 stitution was made men voted in groups according to the 
 bearing of the votes upon their holdings or lack of holdings 
 in property. And yet the story is told. And in the telling 
 is revealed, not conscious lack of honesty, not conscious 
 putting of private interests before the public good, but 
 rather a blind unconscious bias in human thinking. And 
 in the present day there is no lack of illustrations. Holders 
 of property to-day are very much agreed about the rights 
 
88 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 of property. And laboring men are on the whole con- 
 vinced that labor does not get its share and must have more. 
 Germans agree that Germany must have her place out in 
 the sun, and France and England find the moral law de- 
 manding that they keep the Germans in their proper place. 
 Even professors sometimes agree — as to the interests they 
 have in common. They are in large agreement concerning 
 college presidents, college trustees, and professorial freedom. 
 They hold the dogma of their class, that members of the 
 class should have more power. And when one leaves his 
 class and joins the presidents, we know the merry farce of 
 changing points of view, of widening experience, of greater 
 insight into many things. 
 
 I do not wish to press the point too far. I am not saying 
 that human beliefs are simply selfish desires finding expres- 
 sion in the forms of thought. The man who proves that 
 human thinking is "interested" in this sense, proves that 
 his proof is "interested," and we should ask of him not 
 whether his proof is good or bad, but what he hopes to gain 
 for himself by setting up the proof. Nor am I taking as 
 my own the current popular philosophy which scofFs at 
 "absolutes" and finds the meaning of truth in service to 
 the actual ends of actual men. That doctrine too is ren- 
 dering doubtful service in these times of stress. But I am 
 only saying this — that as we view our fellows and our- 
 selves, we find ourselves in groups according to our interests, 
 and in those groups we find common beliefs related to 
 those interests. There is a bias in our thinking. We 
 cannot trust ourselves to be impartial. To do our daily 
 work we must be special in our points of view. Uncon- 
 sciously we use our thoughts as instruments to further our 
 ends. But when we stop to think about it, we hate the 
 special interested point of view; we know that it is not 
 true, not worthy of our deeper selves. And in the seeking 
 for escape from it, we find a second impulse to the building 
 of the colleges, the colleges which shall be free. 
 
 If now the college be defined in terms of these two im- 
 
THE FREEDOM OF THE COLLEGE 89 
 
 pulses, it is essentially, not accidentally, a place of freedom. 
 It is a place in which the human mind is seeking deliverance 
 from its bonds — the bonds of partial knowledge and self- 
 interest. It has no hope of fully achieving such freedom, 
 and yet this end defines its work. Men form their opinions 
 from partial knowledge; the college must know, so far as 
 may be known, all that the human mind has thought and 
 learned which bears on these opinions. Men fashion their 
 thoughts according as their interests and activities have 
 molded and shaped their minds; the college may have no 
 special interests shaping it. It must in this sense stand 
 apart, viewing all interests of men alike with equal eye, and 
 measuring each in terms of every other and the whole. It 
 is a place of knowledge and of criticism. 
 
 What then is academic freedom? It is, it seems to me, 
 the very quality of a college. The question whether or not 
 a college is free is meaningless. An institution which is not 
 intellectually free is not a college, whatever else it be. 
 States may be servants of partial insights and partial in- 
 terests, and so may factories and corporations, and even 
 schools of medicine; but not so colleges. A college is our 
 social and individual striving to escape the bonds which the 
 world's work would fix upon us. It is the search for free- 
 dom from ourselves 
 
 11 
 
 The actual carrying on of the college enterprise brings 
 one to many rather puzzling problems. Even for an 
 individual self-criticism is not an easy task. To do two 
 things at once — to go about one's work, planning and 
 acting as if one's thoughts were true, and yet to know and 
 act as if one's thoughts were wrong and partial — to do 
 both things at once is hard for busy, single-minded men. 
 It is no wonder that we fail. But it is even harder for an 
 institution like a college to do the task. A college has so 
 many independent parts which do not know each other, 
 which take themselves for granted, which have not stopped 
 
9 o THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 to think about themselves, or other parts, or even the 
 college as a whole. Trustees, professors, presidents, de- 
 partments, graduates, students, donors, outside world are 
 all factors in the situation. Each has its share in making 
 for our people knowledge and self-criticism. And they 
 have hardly begun to criticize, to understand themselves, 
 to realize the work they have to do. 
 
 But worse than either of these difficulties is the fact that, 
 though the college has compounded its medicines to cure 
 the public mind, the patient does not come for treatment; 
 he does not know that he is ill. We say that colleges are 
 built because men know their ignorance, that is, the igno- 
 rance of their fellows, and wish to cure it. But motives 
 are not always clear, even to those who act on them. And I 
 am sure that, in the large, our public does not keenly feel 
 the need of criticism; on the other hand, I am not sure 
 that, if it did, the college is the doctor whom it could choose 
 for diagnosis and prescription. 
 
 What shall we do to lure the patient, to get some living 
 forms on which to practice our profession ? I see no other 
 way except to hang our shingle out and let it swing in public 
 places. Perhaps to change the figure would give it more 
 attractiveness. "Clearing House for Opinions; Discount 
 on Popular Prejudices; Foreign Exchange!" And if we 
 catch a patient, we must make it clear to him that he is ill, 
 yes, very ill, and that the social mind is ill also, and all his 
 friends. I fear the method is not quite professional. But 
 something must be done to make people understand that 
 colleges are ready to do a piece of work, and that the work 
 is sorely needed in our country and by our generation. 
 
 Assuming then that we have caught a patient, may I 
 proceed to tell him just what our methods are and what 
 they are not, to arouse his hopes, excite his fears, especially 
 to let him know what college freedom is? 
 
 And first, let it be understood, the college is not simply 
 a school for boys. It is a place to which boys should go 
 because the teachers of men are to be found there, scholars 
 
THE FREEDOM OF THE COLLEGE 91 
 
 whom men respect and honor as their guides and leaders. 
 No man who cannot lead his peers is fit to teach the younger 
 generation. The education of a boy consists in coming 
 into active contact with a group of minds which have com- 
 mand of human thinking; he learns by feeling how they 
 think, and by imitating them. 
 
 Again, the college has no list of dogmas or doctrines 
 which it seeks to teach. There is no catalogue of things 
 to be believed, nor any list of problems which should not 
 be discussed. I have heard the suggestion made that 
 certain matters are not to be regarded as "subjects of 
 reasonable controversy." I am sure that for a college no 
 such prohibition can be made. I do not mean that every 
 problem of human life will be discussed by every student 
 all the time. There must be pedagogic common sense in 
 choosing things to think about. But are there matters 
 which are not "subjects of reasonable controversy"? I 
 know no other test than this — any matter concerning 
 which reasonable men differ is a subject of reasonable con- 
 troversy. And if there be such reasonable disagreements, 
 young minds should know about them in proper time. 
 
 On the other hand, if there are still other subjects on 
 which all men have the same opinions, there can be little 
 harm in letting younger people know of these agreements. 
 The only genuine pedagogic sin I know is that of dragging 
 our students by the nose to preconceived conclusions, 
 blinding their eyes to paths that lead on this side or on that 
 toward truth, and yet pretending that we are leading them 
 into the ways of human thought. Such teaching is not 
 honest; and it will find its own reward for those who give 
 as well as those who take it. 
 
 I do not mean that there is no place for schools which 
 choose to teach some special doctrines which they think 
 important. Such schools are different from free colleges, 
 not in kind but only in degree. No college, however free, 
 can escape the prepossessions of its background, the mental 
 attitude from which it springs. But in the schools of 
 
92 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 which I speak, some special conscious limitations are taken 
 on; the school commits itself to teaching this or that as 
 true. Such schools must first of all try to be fair to doc- 
 trines other than their own. But they must also deal 
 honestly with those for whose support they ask. They 
 have no right to put a label on and then to act and teach 
 as if the label did not mark them off from others; that is 
 what honest labels do. 
 
 Does the receiving of gifts from private donors or public 
 governments destroy or hamper the freedom of the college? 
 Yes, in some degree. Taking the college world at large, 
 such influences are subtly, or not so subtly, felt. But 
 there is no essential reason why they should be present. 
 If they are, some one has failed to understand his task 
 and hence to do it. No college, clearly conceived and 
 honestly administered, would take a gift to which such 
 influence was attached. No college is for sale, and nothing 
 that is for sale, subtly or obviously, can be a college. 
 
 I think that the Association of University Professors, 
 fine as it is in purpose, has tended to increase misappre- 
 hension at this point. The Association in its proposals 
 and discussions has sundered the college in two. It has 
 opposed the teachers and the administrators. Trustees 
 and presidents, it seems to say, must further the material 
 interests of the college, must pay the bills, and find the 
 wherewithal to pay them. Professors, on the other hand, 
 have no concern with interests like these; they are the 
 scholars and teachers, interested in the truth. Professors 
 are free, but trustees and presidents — well, they must 
 get the money, so perhaps they must give up some measure 
 of their freedom. What does this mean? 
 
 It sometimes seems as if professors said, "Let presidents 
 and trustees get money as they can; let them make promises 
 to donors or legislators if need be; but we will see that the 
 promises they give are broken; no man can influence us." 
 Professors free; trustees and presidents slaves, that seems 
 to be the doctrine. But surely such a doctrine is false 
 
THE FREEDOM OF THE COLLEGE 93 
 
 and hateful. No college can live half-slave and yet half- 
 free. Professors have no right to freedom unless the college 
 as a whole is free. The freedom of professors is a myth 
 unless it lives within the freedom of the college. 
 
 I think that in the large, with very little reservation, the 
 colleges are free, trustees and presidents as well as teachers. 
 Donors and legislators are eager to give to institutions which 
 no man can buy; that is their reason for giving. But 
 public confidence in such freedom is not so easy to secure. 
 Men carry the notions of property and ownership from 
 other fields into the college field; they make a gift into 
 a bargain, and so they fail to understand. The college 
 must explain itself, must make its friends, must make its 
 friends and foes alike perceive that it is one in purpose; 
 honest in dealings, seeking to free men from ignorance 
 and self-interest, seeking to make for men knowledge and 
 self-criticism. It has no other purpose in any part or 
 fragment of its being. 
 
 A harder relationship to understand is that of professors 
 and propaganda. How shall men express opinions within 
 the classroom or outside, and yet not make the college seem 
 to be a partisan in public disputes. There are two very 
 different ways in which it might be done. We might 
 arrange that no professor should be a partisan on any 
 public issue; he must remain a scholar, seeing the principles 
 beneath the popular disputes, impartially making all sides 
 clear, and yet not advocating any one of them. Or on the 
 other hand, we might make up a college faculty of many 
 advocates, at least one advocate for every important line 
 of popular thought and impulse, trusting to each to push 
 his cause as strongly as he can. In either case, the college 
 as a whole would remain free and uncommitted. Which is 
 the better plan ? I wonder if we need to choose between 
 them. 
 
 No one who loves a college can fail to feel the attraction 
 of the former plan. We like to think of scholars as standing 
 apart from common quarrels, as looking deeper into life 
 
94 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 than common men, as finding the principles that underlie 
 all common controversies. And so they do, and ought to 
 do. And yet they do not by such study escape men's 
 disagreements; the superficial quarrels reappear down in 
 the lower levels of our thought; scholars are not agreed 
 regarding the issues of human life. They have their points 
 of view, their attitudes of mind, their working theories, 
 their own beliefs. Shall they be advocates of those beliefs? 
 They cannot help it. But on the other hand, are there no 
 limits to the forms their partisanship may take? I think 
 there are. A man who advocates a view as if there were no 
 other views, who finds the total truth in some mere frag- 
 ment of an insight which has come to him, who sees and 
 formulates no underlying principles beneath the strife of 
 parties, is no proper college teacher. A college has a right 
 to expect that every one who serves its cause, whatever 
 else he do, shall keep its faith, its partial insight if you 
 like, that truth is broader than a creed and deeper than 
 the theories of any sect or class. 
 
 Shall college teachers be advocates or critics? I do not 
 think we are ready to choose as yet. We want both types 
 and are not ready to let either go. Most of our men prefer 
 the impartial role; some have the zeal of advocates. And 
 if the scholars keep themselves alive to human situations, 
 if partisans hold fast to academic faith, we need not 
 interfere. We should not like to see our "ninety-three 
 professors " declaring that all our acts are right — right 
 beyond question; nor do we wish our scholars to retire 
 to quiet places, reflecting sadly on the weaknesses of fellow 
 men. One thing we know — whatever individual professors 
 do or think, the college must be impartial; it must not be an 
 advocate; it must urge no cause but its own, the cause of 
 knowledge and self-criticism. 
 
 There are, however, two or three remarks which may be 
 made upon the issue just considered. 
 
 Should we, in choosing teachers, take account of their 
 opinions? If we are well enough acquainted with their 
 
THE FREEDOM OF THE COLLEGE 95 
 
 work to pass on their appointments, we cannot well help 
 knowing what they think. And yet we must not take 
 account of it. We might, if we had found ourselves by 
 blind unconscious preference appointing men of our own 
 points of view, seek out opponents of ourselves to keep the 
 balance. But on no other ground could we be justified in 
 choosing a man because of his beliefs. 
 
 May teachers be dismissed because they hold and ad- 
 vocate this view or that? Such action would contravene 
 the very spirit and purpose of a college. Professors must 
 be good men, must study well, and teach successfully. 
 If these requirements are met, no question can be raised 
 regarding their opinions. The college has no fear of any 
 opinions. It takes them all and judges them. If this be 
 true, the tenure of the teacher is not that of one who is 
 paid to work as he is told, who may be sent away if those 
 who pay him do not like the work he does. His tenure is 
 rather that of the judge who, by the very nature of the 
 task assigned him, is placed beyond control or punishment 
 by those on whom his judgment must be made. 
 
 I think there is a case against the allowing of college 
 presidents to play the role of public advocate. So far as 
 teachers are concerned, safety is found in numbers. No 
 one of them can claim to represent the college as a whole. 
 Whatever one of them may say, a dozen of his fellows will 
 be found to take another point of view. But presidents 
 are wont to speak each for his college. Nothing about them 
 is more obvious than just their singularity. And when a 
 president takes his place in sect or party he takes the college 
 with him as no professor can. I have no doubt that in the 
 public mind one president, engaging in propaganda as a 
 partisan, can do more harm in shaking confidence in aca- 
 demic fairness and impartiality than could a hundred 
 teachers if they should storm and rave in every sect and 
 party that the country knows. And if it should appear 
 that, on the whole, the college presidents are very much 
 alike in mental attitude, are in most cases committed to 
 
96 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 a single point of view regarding human problems, I think 
 that very rightly the colleges would fail of influence upon 
 the public mind, would lose the public confidence on which 
 the doing of their work depends. 
 
 in 
 
 How shall we win and keep that confidence? That is 
 the urgent problem for us and for the people whom we 
 serve. How shall we teach unless the people listen? How 
 shall they listen unless they know that we can teach and 
 that we will? 
 
 Unless a people find, in colleges or elsewhere, some place 
 of criticism, some place where truth is sought, where 
 thought is free, there is no hope for freedom of the people. 
 
 The college must teach, and, first of all, must make the 
 people understand what teaching is. How shall we let 
 them know that we are building knowledge for their use, 
 that we are serving every interest that they have and yet 
 are slaves to none of them, that we will listen to every 
 thought they bring and yet will weigh and value them with 
 thoughts of other men in mind ? 
 
 There is no other way than this: to study and to teach. 
 And teaching is the attempt to make men free. 
 
 Physician, heal thyself! 
 
Ill 
 
 STUDENT ACTIVITIES IN THE COLLEGE 
 
 S I survey the program of yesterday afternoon and 
 this morning my mind is caught by the figure of the 
 cookery or bakeshop. A cook from foreign parts has 
 been brought in to concoct for us some delicious dish, pastry, 
 pudding, or pie. And those of us who precede him on the pro- 
 gram are simply bringing out from the pantry the ingredients 
 which he requires. Mr. Eliot came laden with culture, 
 Mr. Thorndike with discipline; Mr. Hocking set forth the 
 specific purpose, and to-day Mr. Stearns has presented 
 athletics for mingling in the bowl. It is with much fear 
 and trembling that I present my own bundle, the Student 
 Activities. I am aware that they are regarded by many 
 cooks of college theory as spoiling the flavor of the edu- 
 cational food. Or at the best they are only a frosting 
 for the cake, a sauce for the pudding, and I sadly fear that 
 this imported cook may have sauces and frostings of his 
 own for the sake of which he may reject with scorn the 
 offering I have been commissioned to bring. 
 
 But now as I make my contribution to the program, it 
 seems to me that it should be done, not with apology and 
 timid protestation, but rather with confidence, with the 
 assured conviction that no cake or pudding can be worth 
 the eating unless it have this last delicate touch of per- 
 fection which my condiment will give. May I confess that 
 until I found myself obliged to write this paper on Student 
 Actitivies, I had not realized how important, how essential 
 they are. Is it not true in general that one of the best 
 ways of discovering that a cause is important, or a truth 
 significant, is to make a speech about it? Usually one 
 
 97 
 
98 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 makes a speech not because he chooses to do so, but be- 
 cause he is invited to do so. And when the speech has to be 
 prepared and delivered the sheer necessities of the case 
 demand that one believe that what he says is worth saying, 
 no matter what it may turn out to be. In order to make 
 this speech at all I must believe that student activities have 
 a place in the life of the college community, and as I seek 
 to determine that place I have no doubt that it will seem 
 more and more important and significant. 
 
 I 
 
 To begin, then, I am convinced, as I write this paper, 
 that in any ideal college, student activities are of funda- 
 mental importance and that any one who would cook up 
 a college without them need hope to find little appreciation 
 of his wares. I can say this with freedom and irrespon- 
 sibility to-day because mine is not the task of selecting or 
 compounding the elements. I have an article to sell and 
 I will sing its praises long and loud. It is for the cook to 
 decide whether or not he will have it in the dish and if he 
 takes it in, to give it proper mingling with the other stuffs 
 which other vendors have brought in. 
 
 The name "student activities" is intended, I presume, 
 to express a difference or contrast. The name marks them 
 off from the studies, those elements of the college life which, 
 by implication, are either not student affairs or not activi- 
 ties. I fear that our teachers in the colleges do not like the 
 implication. We do not like to have studies regarded as 
 peculiarly belonging to the Faculty, nor, on the other hand, 
 do we wish them degraded to the realm of the mere pas- 
 sivities. And so the very name itself arouses antagonism. 
 It suggests that here is a feature of the college life which does 
 not mix very smoothly with the others. It is not a good 
 label if one would recommend his wares to college teachers 
 who are eagerly striving to tempt the intellectual appetities 
 of the boys entrusted to their charge. 
 
 If we include under the phrase "student activities apart 
 
STUDENT ACTIVITIES IN THE COLLEGE 99 
 
 from athletics" such enterprises as debating, dramatics, 
 music, newspapers, literary magazines, philanthropic and 
 religious organizations, as well as social functions of various 
 types, one may express a very common faculty point of 
 view concerning them in the words, "The less said about 
 them the better." And with that judgment properly 
 interpreted, I am inclined to agree. But I should person- 
 ally not intend to minimize the importance of such activi- 
 ties. It is not a safe generalization to declare that phases 
 of human life are important in direct ratio to the degree 
 to which they are publicly talked about. It is rather 
 assumed amongst us that many very elemental and signifi- 
 cant features of our common life are not to be talked about 
 at all — they are to be taken for granted, to be accepted as 
 given in the very nature of things. And it is just this "given- 
 ness," this inevitableness of "student activities'* which 
 should first of all be recognized as we approach them. 
 We choose to bring boys together into social groups in 
 order that we may teach them, may train their minds, may 
 furnish them with information. But it is an inevitable 
 incident of such a process that the boys should find them- 
 selves together and should at once engage in common 
 activities which seem to them attractive and at least enter- 
 taining. We keep them busy or try to do so five or six or 
 seven hours a day; with due allowance for the separation 
 of sleep, they have many more hours than these to spend 
 together in enterprises of their own choosing. We did 
 not bring them together for the sake of these activities, 
 but from our bringing them together, these activities follow. 
 They are, as it were, a necessary accident of the teaching 
 process. Whether we will or not, there they are and there 
 they will remain in some form or other so long as boys are 
 brought together in the common life of a college campus. 
 And yet, in the presence of these inevitable accidents 
 of our central purpose many of our teachers grudgingly 
 acknowledge their presence, but, resenting it, they say, 
 "Let them alone, the less said about them the better." 
 
ioo THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 Now if this attitude were not born in resentment, I 
 should find it very congenial. The conclusion which it 
 states seems to me excellent, even though the reasoning 
 which leads to it is atrocious. The truth is that we talk 
 too much about student activities, meddle with them too 
 much, and legislate about them too much. And I say 
 this not because they are bad, but because they are too 
 good to be spoiled by our clumsy interferences; not because 
 I am opposed to them, but because I should like to see them 
 freely develop and grow as the spontaneous activities of 
 the boys whose growth and development is our chief con- 
 cern. To tamper with them seems to me like tampering 
 with one's complexion. In one sphere at least we are sure 
 that the improvement of the general health gives better 
 permanent results for the complexion than temporary 
 tampering, however satisfying for the moment. My im- 
 pression is that the same principle holds good in the beauti- 
 fication of colleges; make them strong and healthy and the 
 activities will take care of themselves. 
 
 II 
 
 But whether our ignoring of student activities be due to 
 hatred or to love, there are times when even the most 
 abstract teacher is startled into recognition of them. Last 
 Sunday evening I heard the Dean of one of our great law 
 schools tell about the work of his school. And almost his 
 first remark was, "You will not find any 'activities' at the 
 law school; we give a man enough to do for all the time he 
 can give to activity." And with his words, there flashed 
 across my mind the vision of a liberal college without 
 outside activities. What would it be like to teach liberal 
 studies to a group of students who should give all their 
 time to their studies, whose work should be their play, 
 whose time should be wholly at our command? I think 
 I have still enough of the spirit of the teacher to thrill at 
 that vision. But as I saw it and reflected on it, there came 
 
STUDENT ACTIVITIES IN THE COLLEGE 101 
 
 to mind those terrible words of Newman in which he con- 
 trasts the little we can do for the student with the much 
 that he can do for himself. 
 
 "I protest to you, Gentlemen, that if I had to choose 
 between a so-called University, which dispensed with resi- 
 dence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its degrees 
 to any person who passed an examination in a wide range 
 of subjects, and a University which had no professors or 
 examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young 
 men together for three or four years, and then sent them 
 away as the University of Oxford is said to have done some 
 sixty years since, if I were asked which of these two methods 
 was the better discipline of the intellect, — mind, I do not 
 say which is morally the better, for it is plain that compul- 
 sory study must be a good and idleness an intolerable 
 mischief, — but if I must determine which of the two courses 
 was the more successful in training, molding, enlarging 
 the mind, which sent out men the more fitted for their 
 secular duties, which produced better public men, men of 
 the world, men whose names would descend to posterity, 
 I have no hesitation in giving the preference to that Uni- 
 versity which did nothing, over that which exacted of its 
 members an acquaintance with every science under the 
 sun. 
 
 "How is this to be explained? I suppose as follows: 
 When a multitude of young men, keen, open-hearted, 
 sympathetic, and observant, as young men are, come 
 together and freely mix with each other, they are sure to 
 learn one from another, even if there be no one to teach 
 them; the conversation of all is a series of lectures to each, 
 and they gain for themselves new ideas and views, fresh 
 matter of thought, and distinct principles for judging and 
 acting, day by day." 
 
 Now with these words of Newman ringing in our ears, 
 let us state and answer a fair question, "Would you, if you 
 could, free an undergraduate college from its activities?" 
 My own answer is flatly in the negative. I believe that 
 
102 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 whatever a liberal college may be with them, without them 
 it would be a sorry place in which to live. And for this 
 conclusion there are at least two reasons. First, I am 
 convinced that the complete absorption of the student in 
 his studies would not in most cases give the best kind of 
 college training. Not only are we trying to give college 
 boys acquaintance with a great body of knowledge; more 
 important than this, they must also acquire understanding, 
 interpretation of what they are learning, reconstruction of 
 what they have known. And for this process there is need 
 of leisure, of deliberation and contemplation, of a certain 
 quiet waiting for sub-conscious processes to do their part. 
 These results cannot be achieved merely by digging and 
 grinding. In addition to the work there must be the 
 leisure; the two must be combined if the fruits of culture 
 and intelligence are to be reached. Again, if we view 
 college life fairly, we dare not fail to take account of the 
 constantly repeated statement of graduates that they count 
 certain "activities" as having been of far greater educational 
 value than the studies given and taken in the classroom. 
 I am sure that this statement contains more of falsity than 
 of truth. But there is a truth in it, and it behooves us to 
 isolate it and look it squarely in the face. As I look back 
 on my own experience of teaching and disciplining, I seem 
 to see what these graduates mean. I see it most clearly 
 when I try to single out from the long line of students some 
 one group which shall stand forth as intellectually the best 
 — best in college work and best in promise of future in- 
 tellectual achievement. Much as I should like to do so, 
 I cannot draw the line round my own favorite students 
 in philosophy, nor the leaders in mathematics, nor those 
 successful in biology; nor could I fairly award the palm 
 to the Phi Beta Kappa men who have excelled in all their 
 subjects. It seems to me that stronger than any other 
 group, tougher in intellectual fiber, keener in intellectual 
 interest, better equipped to battle with coming problems, 
 are the college debaters — the boys who, apart from their 
 
STUDENT ACTIVITIES IN THE COLLEGE 103 
 
 regular studies, band themselves together for intellectual 
 controversy with each other and with their friends in other 
 colleges. I am not concerned to argue here the pros and 
 cons of intercollegiate debate. It has its defects as well 
 as its virtues. But if it be true that in this activity many 
 of our best minds find their most congenial occupation and 
 are furthered in intellectual growth rather than hindered 
 in it, here is a challenge which we cannot fail to meet in 
 the administration of college life and studies. And in 
 some measure, though in different forms, what is true of 
 debating holds true of dramatics, of writing, of music, 
 and the other activities. When boys form their clubs or 
 "crowds" for the spontaneous, enthusiastic pursuit of some 
 chosen ideal, they gain from it a power, a liveliness of in- 
 terest which can never be gained where that spontaneity is 
 lacking. 
 
 But now I shall be asked: Would you substitute these 
 activities for the studies — give up the classroom for the 
 lounging room and the Union? Of course not. The very 
 excellence of these activities is that fundamentally they 
 are the fruits of the classroom. But the point is that by 
 these fruits the work of the classroom shall be known. 
 We need not forget that these activities are only accidental 
 and that the real values lie in the studies and the teaching. 
 But none the less it is true that these activities reveal to 
 us, far better than any examinations can do, the success 
 or failure of the classroom itself. They are, as it were, 
 mirrors in which we can see ourselves and our work. If 
 we want to know the effect of what we are doing in the 
 classroom, let us look to see what the students are doing 
 outside of it when they are free to follow their own desires. 
 If they do not, on their own initiative, carry on activities 
 springing out of their studies, then you may count on it 
 that however well the tests are met the studies are of little 
 value. Show me a college in which literature is taught 
 but in which the boys do not band together to read and 
 write and criticise, in which they do not yearn to be them- 
 
104 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 selves "literary." However well literature may be taught 
 in that college it is not well learned. What would you say 
 of the teaching of philosophy which did not send boys off 
 into quarrelling, rending, puzzling groups, determined each 
 to give to his fellows the solutions of the problems that 
 have baffled human thinking? What will you say of the 
 teaching of history, economics, or social science which ends 
 in the passive appropriation of a book? Surely if it is 
 vital, you will find the young men stimulated by it eagerly 
 re-forming and re-shaping in idea the society about them 
 and perhaps going out to do some work to bring their ideas 
 to fulfilment. And if in these and other cases it does appear 
 that the studies in the classroom have no outside effect, 
 lead to no outside activities, what expectation can you 
 have that they will lead to activity after the college days 
 are done? If studies do not stimulate to spontaneous free 
 outside activities, if they are merely the learning of lessons 
 and giving them back, then the results of our training are 
 pitifully small; we may send out good, well-meaning boys, 
 who will do what they are told and refrain from doing 
 anything else, but we shall not send out men of intellectual 
 power and grip who are able to live for themselves the life 
 which the intellect opens before them. 
 
 in 
 
 What, then, in a word, should be our attitude toward 
 these activities? I think that, without officially looking 
 at them, we should be forever watching them as the mariner 
 watches his barometer when the waves are high. And we 
 must see to it that the classroom dominates the activities, 
 making them what they ought to be. And how is that to 
 be done? Can it be done by legislating out of the college 
 all activities not in harmony with the classroom? I fear 
 that very little can be accomplished in that way. The only 
 real way to dominate the activities is to dominate the men 
 who are in them. In a college where the teacher masters 
 the mind and imagination of the pupil, there will be little 
 
STUDENT ACTIVITIES IN THE COLLEGE 105 
 
 trouble about harmful activities. If teachers are mere 
 taskmasters, assigning lessons and seeing that they are done, 
 they need not expect the boy to do them over again a second 
 time just for the love of the task. When the cat's away 
 the mice will play, and they very seldom play at calling 
 the cat to come back so that they may be chased and 
 terrified again. A college is a place where work should be 
 and must be done, but a liberal college in which the student 
 activities are simply reactions from the studies, ways of 
 escape from the dreary grind — such an institution is not a 
 college at all. If we do not succeed in making boys want to 
 do the things which we deem worth doing, then we may be 
 good drill masters, but we are not good teachers, and we 
 have no proper place in a college of liberal culture. 
 
 But I know that I shall be accused of talking in vague 
 generalities and of missing the real point of the issue. 
 Do not these activities interfere with the studies, I shall 
 be asked; do they not take time and energy on which the 
 teacher has a rightful claim ? Yes, they do. But there are 
 many other things whose interference is more serious. As 
 for that, one study, if it be successfully taught, interferes 
 with other studies not so well taught. But in the give and 
 take of a college life, a study should be able to take care of 
 itself. The teacher has large power in his own hands; 
 if he cannot exercise it then the fault belongs to him rather 
 than to his situation. 
 
 Teachers often tell me of their worries about the over- 
 doing of student activities. And I know that they are 
 overdone. But I have far more worry about the men who 
 underdo them. The men I worry about are those who 
 overdo the inactivities. What of the men who do no 
 debating, no acting, no writing, no reading, no philanthropic 
 services, no music? What have we done to them or failed 
 to do to them in the classroom that they should be willing 
 simply not to be in the hours in which they are free? What 
 in the world do they do with themselves? So far as one 
 can see they just dawdle. They are the men who play 
 
106 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 cards or pool, who talk about the teams, read the papers, 
 walk the streets, watch the passers-by. These are the men 
 for whom I feel responsibility, about whose fate I torture 
 my soul with dreadful anticipations. Would you not 
 rather have them engaged in activities? When we have 
 found some way of saving these men from themselves, it 
 will be time for us to deal with their brethren who are at 
 least alive and whose very activity at times puts the class- 
 room to shame. 
 
 The one attitude toward student activities which seems 
 to me deplorable is a kind of sullen hostility which one 
 sometimes finds in earnest college teachers. They give one 
 the impression of having been beaten in a fight, of feeling 
 that the worse cause has prevailed over the better, of re- 
 senting both their defeat and the unfairness of a conflict 
 in which such a defeat is possible. Now the trouble with 
 this attitude is that it is not sane, and further, that it 
 places the teacher in an utterly false relation to his pupils. 
 No teacher can ever afford to be beaten either by his pupils 
 or by their friends. He must be master and that for the 
 reason that he has in charge the fundamental interests upon 
 which all values depend. For the sake of those interests 
 he must dominate the boy both within the classroom and 
 outside it, and whatever the difficulties, he may never 
 admit himself beaten in the task. I am convinced that the 
 teachers in any of the college communities which we know 
 can make of those communities what they will. If they 
 fail, the fault is not in the situation but in the men whose 
 business it is to master it. 
 
 IV 
 
 I began this paper by accepting the principle concerning 
 student activities, "The less said about them, the better." 
 I think you will agree with me that I have been loyal to 
 the principle. I have not tried to say anything but simply 
 to define an attitude. 
 
 And now I leave my parcel on the cook's table. Let him 
 do with it as he will. 
 
PART III 
 DISCUSSIONS IN EDUCATIONAL THEORY 
 
 THE two papers here given are early adventures 
 into the field of educational theory. The first 
 paper was given at the general meeting of the 
 Religious Education Association held at Brown University 
 in March, 191 1. It expresses the conviction that no teach- 
 ing of knowledge can be successful unless it is based upon 
 a study of what knowledge is. It finds logical reflection 
 upon the intellectual process to be essential to any proper 
 understanding of that process as a teacher ought to under- 
 stand it. 
 
 The second paper was read at a meeting of the Associa- 
 tion of Schools and Colleges of New England at Boston 
 University on October 9, 1908. The paper maintains that if 
 the logical distinction between form and content has signifi- 
 cance for the description of thinking, then the theory of 
 formal discipline has corresponding validity for the teacher of 
 thinking. It is not necessary, if one seeks to justify this 
 theory, that one appeal to a discarded and discredited 
 psychology of the Faculties. Logic, modern as well as 
 ancient, confirms the statement that the most important 
 single judgment which can be made about the thinking 
 process is that which singles out its form or method from its 
 content. If this be true then formal discipline in some very 
 real and important sense must be at the very heart of all 
 intellectual training and development. 
 
 107 
 
LOGIC IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 
 
 COLLEGE courses are roughly divided into two classes, 
 (i) those which give training and (2) those which give 
 information, which add to the sum of knowledge. 
 My impression is that logic has kept its place in the curricu- 
 lum as a member of the first group. The teacher of logic, 
 it is commonly supposed, does not deal with any particular 
 set of facts. He is willing to choose his material from any 
 field of human knowledge. He may discuss such diverse 
 statements as All men are mortal, All cats like fish, A straight 
 line is the shortest distance between two points. But in 
 dealing with these he is expected to give to his students 
 a certain mental technique, a certain delicacy of intellectual 
 touch, a strength of mental grasp, which will fit them for the 
 work of thinking, wherever it may be carried on. Now it is 
 not my intention to minimize the importance of the training 
 value of logic. I would maintain, however, that this con- 
 tribution to the aims of college education is far less im- 
 portant than the information or, perhaps better, the insight 
 which logic gives — its additions to the sum of valuable 
 and significant knowledge. In support of this contention 
 I must first attempt to state what the science is and then 
 endeavor to tell what it has to give to the upbuilding of 
 the undergraduate mind. 
 
 In common with other ancient disciplines, logic has 
 suffered many inroads and encroachments from the so-called 
 modern sciences. The old boundary lines have been sadly 
 broken by the New Psychology with its studies of mental 
 procedure and development, by the New Mathematics in 
 its analysis of necessary relationships, by the New Sociology 
 
 108 
 
LOGIC IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 109 
 
 in its classification of the sciences and its general enthusiasm 
 for whatever may be called social. But now face to face 
 with these invaders we have a New Logic as well — a logic 
 well able to give a good account of itself in the war of 
 definitions. In popular opinion, logic has commonly been 
 identified with the mere Art of the Syllogism. But this is 
 simply because in schemes of popular education the syllogism 
 has been singled out for its training value and the other 
 more essential features of the science have been ignored or 
 unknown. But logic is to-day a field of study defined by 
 a clear-cut conception — a conception which at once gives 
 unity to all its parts and marks ofF the whole from other 
 sciences which are themselves sufficiently clear to admit 
 of proper definition. Though the sciences have changed 
 in content and procedure, logic is still the science of the 
 sciences — that is, the science which studies its fellows. 
 It is still the science of thinking, though thinking in the 
 last few centuries has undergone radical transformation. 
 The task of logic is to know the intellectual, the thinking 
 activities of man. Just as the student of ethics takes the 
 activities of willing and choosing — would collate them, 
 describe, classify, explain, organize — in a word, know 
 them — so in a corresponding sense does the logician en- 
 deavor to know what thinking is and does and ought to 
 be. Wherever a man is thinking there is material for us 
 to examine. The physicist measures and explains his data; 
 we will measure and explain the physicist. The biologist 
 tabulates and generalizes his observations; we will tabulate 
 and generalize about biologists. Sociology springs into 
 being as a new intellectual movement; we will endeavor to 
 understand that movement, to know what it is, whence 
 it comes, whither it is bound. In a word, other men think 
 about the world; we think about their thinking, and seek 
 to know thought as they know the facts with which their 
 thought deals. 
 
 This conception of an external scrutiny of the sciences 
 has never appealed very strongly to the scientists them- 
 
no THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 selves. My impression is that they have often felt toward 
 logic as they are now feeling toward the agents of Mr. 
 Carnegie — namely, that they know their own business 
 better than any outsider can know it, and that it would 
 be better if they were left alone to the guidance of their 
 own judgment. It may perhaps clear the issue if I insist, 
 just as Mr. Pritchett does, that our aim is not to dictate 
 what the scientist shall do but simply to know what he is 
 doing. On the other hand, it must be insisted that the 
 logician hopes to understand the work of the scientist in 
 a way and to a degree which is quite impossible to the 
 scientist himself so long as he remains devoted to his own 
 facts and his own point of view. We do not know his facts 
 but we do intend to know him, his aim, his problem, his 
 method, his concepts, his results. For the sake of clearness, 
 however, let me indicate the kind of questions which we 
 ask concerning him. 
 
 Our first and fundamental question is, "What are men 
 seeking as they think?" Now, wherever thinking is found, 
 whether on the street, in the mill, in the laboratory, in the 
 study, that question always receives one answer. Think- 
 ing seeks to attain Truth and to avoid Error. To define 
 these terms then, to understand the common purpose of 
 all men in their intellectual strivings, to find the common 
 element of which all thought activities are simply modi- 
 fications, that is our first task — the discovery of the 
 fundamental terms, the unit of explanation — the first 
 task of every scientist in dealing with his facts. Again we 
 find that the intellectual inquiry divides itself into separate 
 fields, each dealing with a separate group of facts. The 
 historian is dealing with individual sequences and co- 
 existences, the physicist with quantitative changes, the 
 biologist with living forms, the psychologist with conscious 
 processes, the economist with prices and exchanges. And 
 in each case it appears that the nature of the inquiry is 
 molded and shaped by the nature of the material con- 
 sidered. Here then is another set of questions. What are 
 
LOGIC IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM in 
 
 the differences in aim, the differences in method, the differ- 
 ences in concepts employed, which mark off these investi- 
 gations from one another? Or again, since these separate 
 investigations have the common aim of Truth to bind them 
 together in spite of their differences, what are their relations 
 of significance for one another and for the whole? In a 
 word, we know the whole field of human knowledge not in 
 all its contents, but in its form, with its likenesses and 
 differences, its common problems and its separate problems, 
 its general methods and its special procedures, its funda- 
 mental concepts and the modifications of these in special 
 fields. We do not, as is sometimes supposed, claim to know 
 all that is known, but we do intend to know all knowing 
 in exactly the same degree that the biologist can know all 
 life and the physicist know all matter. 
 
 Now it is a commonplace of modern logical theory that 
 in spite of their membership in a common family, the 
 children of Truth have very fundamental differences of 
 presupposition, of problem, and of method. For one group 
 of investigations the chosen task is the formulation of facts 
 in terms of quantity and measurement. For another, all 
 comparisons are those of quality, the likenesses and differ- 
 ences of things. In the mechanical sciences the principle 
 of causation is the final term of explanation, while in 
 biological fields the notion of function seems far more 
 fundamental and significant. In the studies of conscious- 
 ness neither cause nor function seems adequate and both 
 give way before the concept of value as the final term of 
 human experience. Thus we find the sciences, each with 
 its own distinct problem, each dominated by its own pre- 
 suppositions — Sciences of Number and Quantity, of 
 Quality, of Cause and Effect, of Function, of Value — 
 these as we find them in our studies and in our curriculum 
 stand apart as separate enterprises of the human spirit, 
 each commanding the loyalty and interest of its followers. 
 It is this situation which calls for the organizing activity 
 of the student of logic. If we would know our world at all, 
 
ii2 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 if we would understand our own intellectual experiences, 
 these separate groups of judgments must be understood in 
 relation to each other and to the whole. Can the same 
 fact be explained in terms of Quantity and Quality, of Cause 
 and of Function, in terms of Existence and of Value, and if 
 so, how do these different explanations bear upon each 
 other? Here is a world of apparent discrepancies and 
 contradictions which must be solved if we are to understand 
 our own thoughts. It is in no spirit of vainglorious boast- 
 ing that the student of logic approaches his task. 
 
 One further conclusion of logical theory must here be 
 noted, viz., that you can never get unified knowledge by 
 simply adding together these separate contributions of the 
 separate sciences. Departments of knowledge which have 
 different problems, different methods, different presup- 
 positions, cannot be thrown together as bricks upon bricks. 
 Theirs is rather the organic relation in which no part is 
 properly understood except in the light of the whole and yet 
 in which every part performs a function radically different 
 from every other. The history of human thinking is check- 
 ered with the controversies which have arisen from the 
 failure to perceive this relationship. "Are facts describable 
 in terms of quantity? Then the notions of quality must 
 be thrown aside." "Is the life of man genetically derived 
 from lower forms. Then it has no value higher than that 
 of those forms." "Is the human will causally determined? 
 Then it is not free." "Is the world to be conceived as 
 matter in motion? Then it cannot be known as the ex- 
 pression of a divine spirit." These are misunderstandings 
 and misapprehensions, every one of which has come from 
 lack of knowledge of intellectual relationships. To give a 
 way of escape from these misunderstandings is some part 
 of the task of logic. 
 
 If now we turn to the conception of Education, the place 
 of logic in the general scheme is not hard to determine. 
 It is, I presume, the function of intellectual education to 
 give to a student a genuine and intimate understanding of 
 
LOGIC IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 113 
 
 the intellectual life of his people, and to fit him to play his 
 proper part in the activities of that life. It is the pre- 
 supposition of every institution of learning that education 
 in this sense is good preparation for living as a man ought 
 to live. A man is better, we believe, for knowing what his 
 fellows have thought and are thinking, and for being able 
 to do some thinking for himself. 
 
 Now on this presumption what is the place of logic in 
 the curriculum? And especially, how can logic contribute 
 to the moral and religious values of the life of the student ? 
 There are two lines of answer which I should like to suggest. 
 
 In the first place, the most striking weakness of the 
 curriculum of the American college to-day is that it is a 
 thing of shreds and patches with little pretension to any 
 unity of design or purpose. Under the wide elective system, 
 a student is given opportunity to devote himself to any or 
 all of a great multitude of intellectual inquiries, each with 
 its own special task, each with its own special point of view. 
 How is he to know the significance of these studies for each 
 other, for thought as a whole, or for life as a whole? It is 
 the pride and boast of each scientist that he does not depart 
 from his own problem nor from his own method. Who 
 then is to give to the student the bearings of that method 
 and that problem? That is a question which still awaits 
 an answer. But in these latter days certain measures of 
 improvement have been attempted. A number of colleges 
 have insisted- that a student shall work for a little 
 while in each of the great branches of learning, and 
 they are beginning to require that he study thor- 
 oughly in at least one department of knowledge. But this 
 is no genuine solution of the problem. Let me ask — If you 
 add together a little Mathematics, a little Literature, a 
 little each of History, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, 
 Social Science, International Law, and Art, what do you 
 get? You certainly get a great deal of something, but what 
 is it? In its parts it is knowledge, because within the 
 parts it is organized, but as a whole it is not knowledge, 
 
H4 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 for the different parts are not organized, but are simply 
 thrown together. The boy who gets this education knows 
 a great many things but he does not know the world, nor 
 does he in any real sense know the intellectual life either of 
 himself or of his fellows. If logic could only succeed in 
 preventing this piling together of Quantities, Qualities, 
 Functions, and Values into one great heap; if, as the end 
 of a student's college life approaches, it could help him 
 to single out these separate elements, to arrange, relate and 
 unify them, in a word, to understand them, its work would 
 be worth while. If this could be done the college would 
 send forth fewer hodge-podge dilettantes, fewer uneducated 
 specialists. It would give us more men of genuine culture. 
 But there is another contribution of logic which is of even 
 more immediate value to the interests of morals and of 
 religion. I can simply state it here without stopping to 
 explain. Morals and religion have always construed life 
 in terms of Value. In the last three or four centuries, 
 however, the physical and natural sciences have thrust 
 upon the human consciousness the other concepts, especially 
 those of Quantity, Causation and Function. Now the 
 development of these sciences has been so marvelous, their 
 achievements so great, that by mere fatigue of human 
 attention, by mere distraction of interest, the Value 
 conceptions have been obscured, neglected, and in many 
 cases even lost. Here is a situation with which every 
 college faculty is called upon to deal. No college has a 
 right to-day to send forth boys into the activities of human 
 living without giving them a clear understanding of what 
 the Value conceptions are and how they differ from the 
 notions of Cause and Function which dominate the fields 
 of Physics and Biology. If a boy has not been made to 
 see that human life demands a type of explanation different 
 from those given to matter, to plant, and to animal, then 
 the college has not done its work, and the boy is not intel- 
 lectually prepared for the moral situations which lie before 
 him. 
 
LOGIC IN THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 115 
 
 If now we sum up our conclusions, I think we may say 
 that logic has three contributions to make to the moral 
 and religious welfare of the college student. 
 
 In the first place, it has undoubted training value which 
 for purposes of this discussion need only be mentioned. 
 
 Secondly, by its studies of the relations of the sciences 
 to each other and to the total work of thinking, it makes 
 possible some intelligible formulation of that world-wide 
 view which underlies every system of religious belief. It 
 frees us from the limitations of special problems, special 
 methods, special fields. It opens up to us the unitary life 
 of the human spirit. This is its contribution to religion. 
 
 And thirdly, it makes clear the peculiar and character- 
 istic concepts of Value in terms of which we may best 
 understand this human life of ours. In this it brings clear- 
 ness and order into the field of morals. 
 
 I fear that I have made large claims for the significance 
 of logic. But it is hard to see how, in an institution de- 
 voted to thinking, one could claim less for the science which 
 studies thinking itself. I may also plead that this is not the 
 first time that the maxim "Know thyself" has been given 
 an important place in a scheme of liberal education. 
 
II 
 
 IS MENTAL TRAINING A MYTH 
 
 I AM sure that you have all heard the most recent theory 
 of classical scholarship with regard to the real or mythical 
 character of Homer. It is, you remember, that Homer is 
 a myth, that the Iliad was not written by him, but by another 
 man of the same name. It is in very much the same spirit, 
 I fear, and with very much the same result, that I enter 
 upon the attempt to provoke in your minds a discussion of 
 the theory of mental training or formal discipline. My 
 thesis, in a word, is this: "The theory of mental training, 
 the old presupposition of our educational systems, is false, 
 but its lineal descendant of the present generation is true, 
 and that descendant rightly bears the name of its reverend 
 ancestor." 
 
 It is rather a pleasant task for a layman to do what he 
 can in defense of so old and worthy a tradition as that of 
 mental training, for whether true or false, it has done much 
 for the theory and practise of our education. It was formu- 
 lated not later than the Greeks, it was taught throughout 
 the entire classic tradition, it has been the common dogma 
 of educational science until the present day, it is advocated 
 by college presidents and Committees of Ten; if we accept 
 their own words, it is practised by many of those who de- 
 clare themselves its enemies. In a word, it is a respectable 
 old theory, perhaps even a sacred one; it has played its part, 
 and done its work well; it is worthy of such gratitude as 
 we may care to offer. So, at least, it appears to the lay 
 mind, for I have observed that however eager we may be 
 to press on to the discovery of new truths and the destruc- 
 tion of old dogmas in our own academic work, most of us 
 
 116 
 
IS MENTAL TRAINING A MYTH 117 
 
 are impatient and distressed when the workers in other fields 
 direct their attacks upon those ancient structures in which 
 we have housed our uncritical beliefs and prejudices. As 
 a layman, then, speaking to students and practitioners of 
 educational theory, may I come before you to stir up dis- 
 cussion by saying a good word for the old theory of formal 
 discipline, and if it be no longer among us to receive the 
 praise, then let the praise fall at the door of that member 
 of the family who to-day lays rightful claim to the ancestral 
 place among educational beliefs. 
 
 As one reads over the literature of the discussion, the 
 most satisfactory statements of the position are found in 
 the illustrations rather than in the technical definitions. 
 This may, of course, be due to the layness of one's own 
 mind, but to the lay mind, at least, it indicates that the 
 discussion is still in its preliminary stages. The fact is 
 that the critics of the theory are applying in the educa- 
 tional field a psychological point of view which has not yet, 
 even in its own field, been brought to definiteness and 
 clearness; and, on the other hand, the theory of mental 
 training, formulated centuries ago, has for the most part 
 received expression from men not cognizant of, or, at least, 
 directly concerned with, the recent changes in psychological 
 science — from college presidents, for example, and from 
 other men whose business it is to represent before the public 
 the aims and achievements of school and college. Now, 
 it is possible, of course, that the new view is the true one, 
 and that the college presidents quite unintentionally are 
 misleading their hearers. It may be, for example, that 
 President Woodrow Wilson is mistaken when he says: 
 "We speak of the 'disciplinary' studies . . . having in 
 our thought the mathematics of arithmetic, elementary 
 algebra, and geometry, the Greek-Latin texts and grammars, 
 the elements of English and of French or German. . . . 
 The mind takes fiber, facility, strength, adaptability, 
 certainty of touch from handling them, when the teacher 
 knows his art and their power. The college . . . should 
 
n8 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 give . . . elasticity of faculty and breadth of vision, so 
 that they shall have a surplus of mind to expend. . . ." So, 
 too, President Timothy Dwight of Yale University may 
 have been wrong when he said of college education, "Such 
 an education is the best means of developing thought 
 power in a young man, and making him a thinking man of 
 cultured mind." It must be admitted that the statements 
 have something of the ring of the discredited and outworn 
 psychology of faculties rather than of that functional science 
 which is claiming the field to-day. But, personally, I am 
 of the opinion that the difficulty is only one of words. I 
 am inclined to think that the college presidents do know 
 what they are driving at, even though, strange as it may 
 seem, they are not able to express it very happily. And 
 if this be so, we may well take upon ourselves the benevolent 
 task of putting words into their mouths. And, at the 
 same time, we may suggest to their critics that 
 they, too, have as yet failed to reach a clearness of state- 
 ment which would justify the throwing of stones at the 
 windows of their predecessors and present rulers. In a 
 word, what a lay mind like my own would like to do is to 
 reduce the two conflicting theories to the terms of a com- 
 mon point of view so that, face to face and on the same 
 footing, we may fairly determine to which of them belongs 
 the victory in the conflict which they are waging. 
 
 To begin, then, with illustrations, we are told that the 
 theory of mental training is a "gymnastic" theory of mind. 
 It is a notion drawn from analogy with the body. Just as 
 the arm may, by exercise, develop strength which may then 
 be used for many purposes, such as throwing a ball, wielding 
 a pen, holding a plow, so the mind and its various faculties 
 may, by proper training, be increased in power, which may 
 then be expended wherever demand may call. For example, 
 by exercising the memory in nonsense syllables or Latin 
 verse, one may improve the memorizing power in general; 
 by training the observation in the laboratory, one may so 
 develop the capacity for sense-discrimination that in every 
 
IS MENTAL TRAINING A MYTH 119 
 
 field perception will be keener and more exact. In short, 
 as the mind has many faculties, each doing its own part 
 of the mental toil, each of these may be strengthened 
 through exercise, and by a proper course of study all of them 
 may be so developed that, to quote Chancellor MacCracken, 
 the student "will possess a better disciplined mind for 
 whatever work of life he may turn his attention to." 
 
 Now, against this theory, two lines of argument have 
 been advanced : the first theoretical, a matter of definition, 
 and the second experimental, a matter of fact. The argu- 
 ment from definition has challenged the description of the 
 mind contained in the theory of mental training as given 
 above. It has criticized the division of the mind into 
 faculties, and has shown that division to be absurd. Upon 
 that point there can be no further question, nor need there 
 be, so far as the notion of formal discipline is concerned. 
 It has also challenged the analogy between mind and body 
 implied in the notions of exercise, practise, gymnastic 
 training, and has raised the query whether the mind is 
 really the sort of thing that can be trained and practised. 
 This question we must keep before us as essential to the 
 controversy. On the side of fact, Professor William James, 
 whose hand has gone early and deep into most of the stir- 
 rings of the philosophical caldron during the last twenty- 
 five years, has here, too, had a leading part in the melting 
 down of conventional and uncritical dogma. Experi- 
 menting upon memory processes, he seemed to find little 
 improvement in grasp of one kind of material as a result 
 of memorizing another, and so he has stated the general 
 question, How far is it experimentally true that exercise in 
 one sort of mental activity gives facility and power in other 
 activities more or less closely akin to the first? 
 
 With regard to the question of fact much valuable ex- 
 perimentation has been carried on in the psychological 
 laboratories and the schools during the progress of the 
 discussion. The question being how far one activity of the 
 mind is influenced by the carrying on of other activities, 
 
120 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 the answers might a priori be expected to range anywhere 
 from the extreme view of formal discipline on the one hand 
 to the equally extreme statement of psychological atomism 
 on the other. According to the former, the mind may, 
 by the exercise of certain general powers, assume immediate 
 and complete command over great masses of concrete 
 functions. According to the latter, each activity of the 
 mind is so separate and independent that only by its own 
 exercise with all its distinctive peculiarities and limitations 
 can it be improved in efficiency and ease. The former 
 view has been so often made ridiculous by the overstate- 
 ment of its opponents that I think one may be pardoned 
 for retaliation when opportunity presents itself. 
 
 What will you say of a theory that the training of the 
 mind is so specific that each particular act gives facility 
 only for the performing again of that same act just as it 
 was before? Think of learning to drive a nail with a yellow 
 hammer, and then realize your helplessness if, in time of 
 need, you should borrow your neighbor's hammer and find 
 it painted red. Nay, further think of learning to use a 
 hammer at all if at each stroke the nail has gone further 
 into the wood, and the sun has gone lower in the sky, and 
 the temperature of your body has risen from the exercise, 
 and, in fact, everything on earth and under the earth has 
 changed so far as to give to each stroke a new particularity 
 all its own, and thus has cut it off from all possibility of 
 influence upon or influence from its fellows. No one, so far 
 as I know, maintains a theory such as this but, on the 
 other hand, no one, so far as I know, maintains a theory 
 of the exercise of the mind in general as giving immediate 
 control of every concrete situation in life. The truth lies 
 somewhere between the two, and just where it lies is matter 
 of fact to be determined by factual investigation so far as 
 may be. 
 
 The results of the experimental inquiries thus far made have 
 received their latest summarization in the papers of Pro- 
 fessors Angell, Pillsbury, and Judd. According to these 
 
IS MENTAL TRAINING A MYTH 121 
 
 writers, one may say that in practically all the functions 
 open to statistical investigation the influence of practise in 
 one function upon certain others has been established to a 
 degree worthy of the attention of the student of education. 
 For example, with regard to that memory problem to which 
 Professor James first called attention, Professor Pillsbury 
 declares that the investigations seem to leave little doubt 
 that rote memory can be improved by practise, and that 
 the same is true of logical memory so far as can be de- 
 termined. Professor Judd, after an account of other in- 
 quiries, sums up the situation by the statement, "These 
 facts certainly justify the statement that mental functions 
 are interrelated and interdependent in the most manifold 
 ways. Sometimes the training of an attitude aids the 
 positive development of certain other attitudes. Some- 
 times, one function interferes with other functions. Above 
 all stands the fact that every new experience changes the 
 individual's capacity for new experiences." If these are 
 fair summaries of the results of the investigations, then I 
 think one may safely say that, as yet, the theory of formal 
 discipline is not experimentally disproven. 
 
 In the field of definition the first task of those who take 
 the new point of view is that of formulating a principle 
 other than that of formal discipline in which the facts thus 
 far established shall be properly recognized. Almost with- 
 out exception this has been accomplished by some variation 
 of the formula of Professor Thorndike, "The answer which 
 I shall try to defend is that a change in one function alters 
 any other only in so far as the two functions have as factors 
 identical elements." But if one ask for the precise meaning 
 of this term "identical" or "common elements," it must be 
 said frankly that at this point little seems to have been 
 accomplished. Professor Thorndike tells us that he means 
 by identical elements "mental processes which have the 
 same cell action in the brain as their physical correlate." 
 But this definition can hardly be of immediate service to 
 the student of education, and apart from this attempt at 
 
122 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 definition we are given only lists of common elements such 
 as methods, habits of attention, ideals, attitudes of will, 
 and the like, all of which are significant, but no one of which 
 gives us an answer to the question, "What do we mean by 
 the 'common element'?" as employed in the theory in 
 question. The simple fact is that at this point the new 
 theory has not yet reached the stage of clear formulation; 
 it is still in process of development. In short, while psycho- 
 logical experiment and theory have established as a good 
 tentative hypothesis this notion of the common element, 
 experiment has not yet proceeded far enough to carry it 
 beyond the hypothetical stage, nor has the formulation been 
 made so clear and definite as to furnish a secure basis for 
 attack on other theories which have some measure of 
 scientific respectability. 
 
 In this situation, it is the primary purpose of this paper 
 to urge that, in our search for the "common element," we 
 turn from the field of psychology into that of another em- 
 pirical science which deals with consciousness, — I mean 
 the science of logic. And, in justification of this procedure, 
 may I suggest that it was from the point of view of logic, 
 and not of psychology, that the doctrine of formal discipline 
 was first stated and maintained? The very term, formal 
 discipline, gives evidence of its origin, indicating a point of 
 view far removed from that of the psychologist, and it may 
 be that the theory first formulated by logic still retains a 
 significance from the standpoint of that science. At any 
 rate, I venture to offer as a subject for this evening's dis- 
 cussion the following thesis: "For the empirical science of 
 logic the term form, as applied to our intellectual processes, 
 indicates a common element, or a series of common ele- 
 ments, in those processes, which makes the theory of formal 
 discipline at least intelligible and apparently tenable as a 
 doctrine of intellectual training." In other words, formal 
 training is discipline in certain discoverable forms of in- 
 tellectual activity. It does not imply the bad psychology 
 of the faculties; it does imply the thoroughly sound and 
 
IS MENTAL TRAINING A MYTH 123 
 
 respectable distinction of form and content which is made 
 by the logician. 
 
 Now, I know that thus to flaunt logic in the face of the 
 psychologist and his disciples is, in these days, to invite 
 ridicule and gentle intolerance from one's adversaries. 
 Year after year I have the pleasure of seeing a definition 
 of the philosophical sciences frame itself in the minds of 
 an elementary class as they acquire familiarity with current 
 literature of the type represented by Professor Karl Pearson. 
 And the definition is this: "Originally all knowledge was 
 a confused mass of popular and uncritical opinions; from 
 this mass there have emerged separate fragments which 
 have reached clearness of expression and accuracy of method; 
 these are the sciences; that which is still left of the original 
 chaos is philosophy." Such a definition coming from un- 
 critical minds is thoroughly typical of a great amount of 
 the superficial thinking of the time. My impression is that 
 it has found a foothold even within the field of education, 
 for even here I have seen the term philosophical applied to 
 a method as a term of reproach for lack of scientific accuracy. 
 But it is the secondary thesis of this paper to insist that for 
 the student of education the philosophical sciences, es- 
 pecially those of logic, ethics, and esthetics, are essential. 
 With a brave heart, therefore, as the advocate of a cause, 
 I venture to ask you to seek in the field of logic those com- 
 mon elements of intellectual process which the logician 
 calls its forms. 
 
 The distinction between form and content on which the 
 science of logic rests is not an easy one to express. Since 
 the doctrine of formal discipline was first stated the con- 
 cept of form has been shaped and reshaped by many a 
 generation of thinkers, and as this has been done, logic has 
 gone through transformations quite as radical as that of 
 psychology from its earlier to its later stage. Even now 
 the presuppositions of the science are being questioned and 
 tested by the school of Pragmatists, and the end of that 
 controversy is not yet. But meanwhile, the distinction of 
 
124 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 form and content seems to me to remain as an essential 
 concept which through long examination has been brought 
 to a relatively high degree of definiteness and usefulness. 
 
 The distinction is that of material to be arranged (the con- 
 tent) and the way in which it is arranged (the form). This 
 does not mean, of course, that first we have material which 
 has no form, no arrangement, and thereupon we take it 
 and put it into relationships. It means, rather, that in 
 every actual object of experience we can and must for 
 purposes of description separate in thought the two ele- 
 ments of the content and the form. Thus if I place these 
 pieces of paper in an ordered arrangement and number 
 them i, 2, 3, 4, 5, — then the papers are for me a certain 
 content, a material, while the numerical order is the form 
 in which I now place them. Or, again, if a man who is 
 building a boat takes wood and nails, paint and pitch, 
 these are for him the materials, the content, to be used; 
 while, on the other hand, the fitting and joining of the parts, 
 the designing, the building, the finishing, all these are 
 processes of giving to the material a form, that structure 
 and model after which the builder of the boat must seek. 
 Or, again, if I examine a tree I find not only leaf and branch 
 and trunk, each with its own constituent parts, but each 
 of these stands in definite relations to all the others; and, 
 further, as the process of growth goes on, not only is there 
 addition of new material and casting ofF of old, but there 
 are also those transformations of inner and external re- 
 lationship which are the form, the very manner of its living. 
 
 Now, it is in this sense of the term that the student of 
 logic examining our mental activities attempts a classi- 
 fication of their formal elements, their similarities of pro- 
 cedure. His purpose is to arrange them in a diverging 
 series leading from the most fundamental and universal 
 down through its subforms, and the sub-forms of these, 
 which step by step become less extensive in their scope, 
 until we approach as near as we may to the particular modes 
 of concrete thinking, with all their peculiarities and unique- 
 
IS ME NT J L TRAINING A MTTH 125 
 
 nesses. The results of this attempt are to be found in those 
 lists of categories which from Aristotle down have held a 
 central place among the achievements of the logicians. It 
 is not my purpose at this time to suggest a list of the cate- 
 gories, but I should like to mention two or three of them 
 for the sake of giving point to the thesis that formal dis- 
 cipline is the practise of the mind in certain forms or methods 
 of thinking which are "common elements" in wide ranges of 
 our experience. 
 
 The most fundamental of the categories is that which 
 has long been expressed as the Law of Contradiction, but is 
 now usually stated in terms of system, coherence, organiza- 
 tion. It is a generalization of the observed fact that the 
 mind, wherever and however it thinks, is always striving 
 after order, is seeking to make systematic a content which 
 has been thus far relatively chaotic and incoherent. It is 
 a statement of the fact that you and I, as our daily life 
 goes on, are thinking multitudes of thoughts which, upon 
 examination, turn out to be contradictory of each other, 
 and which, therefore, must be so modified that they may 
 dwell together in the same thought-system. It is an 
 expression of the principle that our various judgments and 
 descriptions of the world are so related and interrelated 
 that no one of them can be regarded as finally true until 
 it has been shown to be consistent with every other judg- 
 ment of fact made by the same mind about the same world. 
 From this point of view, then, the one fundamental form 
 of mental activity, the one "common element" in all mental 
 procedure is the making of judgments consistent with one 
 another, the constructing of a system of judgments within 
 which each of them may find a proper place. In a word, 
 it is the eradication of inconsistency, the establishing of 
 order. 
 
 An excellent illustration of this demand for formal unity 
 was furnished me in my own experience during the past 
 summer. Sitting day by day looking across Long Island 
 Sound from a point on the Connecticut shore, I had in some 
 
126 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 way or other gotten the notion that my gaze was directed 
 toward the north; from this it followed as a matter of direct 
 inference that Providence lay on my right hand and New 
 York on my left. It is true that the notion also required 
 the revision of certain other ideas about the rising of the 
 sun and the going down of the same, but I have not, as a 
 matter of fact, had much interest in the rising of the sun, 
 nor, so far as points of the compass are concerned, in its 
 setting either. And so these obvious difficulties failed to 
 bring my imagination into line with the descriptions which 
 I can remember as given in my old school geography. 
 When, however, it became necessary for me to start for 
 Providence, other considerations appeared. Going to the 
 station as I did, facing away from the water, I fully intended 
 to take a train toward the left, but fortunately, station- 
 master and brakemen intervened and quite contrary to 
 my own imagining I was led and carried to the city and the 
 college of my search. But not even here were my troubles 
 ended, for during the four different journeys which I have 
 taken along the line during the summer I have spent hours, 
 I am sure, in trying to determine as a matter of imagination, 
 on which side of the line the station house at New London 
 lies, whether on your right or your left hand as you approach 
 it from New Haven. The shock of finding it where it ought 
 not to be gives one a feeling of turned-roundness that no 
 one, I think, would willingly encounter. It is the shock 
 of the failure of one's thinking. It means that one has not 
 succeeded in bringing one's mental content into order. 
 The judgment "the station will appear on the left" and 
 the perceptual experience "there it is on the right" are 
 left facing each other in such flat and blank contradiction 
 that one feels either that he is a fool, or that, with Alice, 
 he has wandered through the looking-glass to the region 
 where the laws of logic no longer apply. 
 
 If now it be asked what are some of the sub-forms, the 
 less fundamental modes of relating contents which the 
 mind employs, it should be noted that one of them has been 
 
IS MENTAL TRAINING A MYTH 127 
 
 already given — the form of space — of position, direction, 
 and distance. The space relations do not apply to all the 
 objects of our experience, nor do they exhaust all the re- 
 lationships of those objects to which they do apply, but 
 they are none the less among the most significant of the 
 methods which the mind uses in its work. Other forms 
 whose importance for our thinking are equally obvious are 
 the establishing of causal relationships, which may be 
 carried on throughout the entire field of natural phenomena, 
 the category of likeness and difference which finds expres- 
 sion wherever the activities of comparison and discrimination 
 appear. Somewhat different in type are the activities of 
 representation in terms of written and spoken language, 
 including the language of number upon which our sciences 
 depend for complexity and breadth of view, as well as for 
 accuracy of statement. These activities of comparing 
 and discriminating, of establishing causal and spatial 
 relations, of representing our sensuous content in the various 
 symbolisms of language, all these are typical instances of 
 the mind's activity as it constructs and systematizes its 
 world. As such, each of them gives us a certain common 
 element of "form," which will be found in wide ranges of 
 mental activity; each of them may be developed and 
 trained as a distinctive mode of thinking. If now we may 
 state the doctrine of formal discipline in the terms which we 
 have tried to define, it would run somewhat as follows: 
 It is one of the tasks of education to so train the mind 
 that it may do well the work of thinking. In order to 
 accomplish this, it must select those kinds of mental activity 
 which seem most fundamental and important for the life 
 of the student. It must then make such selection of studies 
 and must provide such a teacher that the student practised 
 in these forms of thinking shall be made ready to use them 
 as well as possible in the new situations which are his 
 opportunities for achievement. In explanation of this 
 statement, I should like to offer a few words of interpre- 
 tation and restriction. 
 
128 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 It has been said that formal discipline sets only one of the 
 tasks of the educator for the reason that, obviously, the 
 training of the mind in this sense is not all of education. 
 There must be teaching of the will and of the emotions, as 
 well as the merely mental processes. Quite as important, 
 too, is the task of furnishing the mind with proper content, 
 of giving it acquaintance with the world, of supplying it with 
 facts, with interests, of giving it something to think about. 
 It is a valid criticism of much of our moral teaching in the 
 past that we have too often simply laid down the moral 
 laws, or forms, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor," and have 
 left our pupils in such ignorance, both of themselves and 
 their neighbors, that their morality has expended itself in 
 idle sentiment or in blundering stupidity. So, too, with 
 regard to intellectual training. It seems to me that the 
 wave of criticism against formal training as such is simply 
 the result of that great inrush of new thought material 
 from the natural sciences which has made us despise the 
 thinking of those who, in an earlier time, had little of in- 
 formation upon which to employ their forming activities. 
 But none the less, the formal side is essential, and it becomes 
 more and more essential according as greater masses of 
 material are thrust upon us to be rescued from incoherence 
 and chaos. 
 
 Again, if the question be raised "What are the best studies 
 for the training of the mind; ought we to study the classics 
 or the sciences, fine arts or engineering?" I fear that I have 
 no answer ready. I am persuaded, however, that far more 
 important than the subject is the mind of the teacher. 
 The one sure way to learn good thinking is to come into 
 contact with a mind which thinks well and to feel its in- 
 fluence. In the game of thinking, as in the games of the 
 athletic field, one learns best by practise in fast company. 
 And it is not, in my opinion, necessary, as is sometimes 
 suggested, that the method of the teacher should find 
 expression in conscious ideals which may be communicated 
 as guiding principles to the student. Knowledge of the 
 
IS MENTAL TRAINING A MYTH 129 
 
 forms of logic is, alas, no guarantee of excellence in their 
 use, just as acquaintance with the symbolism of mathe- 
 matics is not always conjoined with accuracy and precision 
 in the conduct of life. 
 
 With regard to the experimental inquiries into the prob- 
 lem in hand, it should be said that from the point of view 
 here taken it does not follow that practise in a form of think- 
 ing in one set of contents must give at once equal facility in 
 the same sort of thinking in another field. It does not fol- 
 low that the college teacher or college graduate is fully 
 equipped, in virtue of his training, to build a ship, manage 
 a caucus, teach a school, or rule a home. In these activities, 
 as well as in all others in which men engage, it is necessary 
 that the mind be well stored in addition to being well trained. 
 For the carrying on of any pursuit, we need not only talent, 
 native or acquired, but also information, interest, practise,, 
 before the work can be successfully done. Exercise in one 1 
 function should not be expected, therefore, to give equal 
 facility in the carrying on of another. Obviously it does 
 not, and the degree of the difficulty of transfer is determined, 
 not only by identity or differences in the formal elements, 
 but also by differences and similarities in the contents as 
 well. That such a position is in accordance with the 
 results of investigations thus far made will not, I think, 
 be denied. 
 
 It is often asked, when words are not used in the senses 
 which we have given them, "But are not the forms of think- 
 ing merely contents after all; does not the distinction of form 
 and content break down, therefore, into the description of 
 mental processes in terms of that which they contain?" 
 To this we may answer, "Yes, the forms of thinking are 
 mental contents in at least two legitimate senses: first, in 
 that they are within the mind, are elements of the mental 
 process; and, second, in that they can be stated in terms of 
 principles and appear as fully formed judgments or ideals, 
 as, for example, in the causal law, 'Given conditions are 
 always followed by the same result.' ' But neither of these 
 
i 3 o THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 uses of the term content is that which we have employed; 
 ours is the abstract resolution of every intellectual process 
 into its material and its form, and the double or triple use 
 of the term content should not be allowed to plunge us into 
 ambiguity. 
 
 The one word which sums up the theory of formal dis- 
 cipline is method, or, rather, methods. It is the theory that 
 the mind can be trained to do well certain kinds of work, 
 to follow successfully certain methods of procedure. It is, 
 I think, what Mr. Thorndike, in spite of his hostility to the 
 theory, has in mind when, summing up the results of his 
 own work, he says: "The chief duty of serious students of 
 the theory of education to-day is to form the habit of in- 
 ductive study and learn the logic of statistics. Long after 
 every statement in this book has been superseded by a 
 truer one the method which it tries to illustrate will still be 
 profitable, and the ideals of accuracy and honesty in statis- 
 tical procedure by which I hope it has been guided will 
 still be honored." 
 
 And, finally, may I insist that the doctrine of formal 
 discipline, as so stated, has no connection whatever with 
 the psychology of faculties. If there is one notion which 
 would break down the conception of a system of formal 
 modes of procedure, it is that of the mind as broken up into 
 the separate minds of reasoning, observation, imagination, 
 memory, and the rest. The advocates of formal discipline 
 may blithely join forces with their opponents in consigning 
 to oblivion a dogma which has perished from the earth and 
 has left behind no one to perpetuate its name. 
 
 And so with reservation and explanation I offer you for 
 discussion an interpretation of the doctrine of formal dis- 
 cipline from the standpoint of the science of logic. Men- 
 tal training does not seem to me by any means 
 the whole of education, but, on the other hand, mental 
 training is not, so far as I can see, a myth. It is a theory 
 which has found lodging in many minds not given to mythi- 
 cal imaginings. It is a theory which, as one of the stand- 
 
IS MENTAL TRAINING A MYTH 131 
 
 ard books in education seems to say, though a psychological 
 absurdity, is yet obviously true as an explanation of the 
 facts of mental experience. It is a theory which is, at least, 
 respectable, and, however it may appear from another 
 point of view, from its own standpoint it seems to have a 
 meaning. 
 
 I cannot close this paper nor consider my task ended 
 until I have at least stated for your consideration the 
 secondary thesis which has been implicit throughout the 
 discussion. It is this — that the students of educational 
 theory seem to me to give relatively far too much attention 
 to the descriptive work of psychology and far too little to 
 the results of the normative sciences of ethics, esthetics, 
 and logic. In his keen and lucid study of educational 
 psychology Professor Thorndike draws just the distinction 
 which I have in mind. At the beginning of the book, 
 speaking from the standpoint of psychology he says: "The 
 work of education is to make changes in human minds and 
 bodies." And of the mind he says elsewhere (p. 30), "The 
 mind is really but the sum total of an individual's feelings 
 and acts, of the connections between outside events and 
 'its responses thereto, and of the possibilities of having such 
 feelings, acts, and connections." In his closing chapter, 
 however, after discussing the facts of the mental life from 
 this point of view, he says, "A theory of education must 
 decide two questions: (1) What ought people to be? (2) how 
 shall we change them from what they are to what they 
 ought to be?" With respect to the first of these questions 
 Mr. Thorndike says, "The studies which have been made 
 in this book have nothing to do with it." But it seems to 
 me obvious that the question "What ought people to be?" 
 is one which the student of education must keep in mind 
 from the beginning to the end of his inquiry. 
 
 First he must do so for the very evident reason that if 
 he is not simply to change his pupils, but to change them 
 in the direction in which they ought to go, he must know 
 the ideal in terms of which that direction is defined. And, 
 
132 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 secondly, just so soon as he takes the standpoint of that 
 ideal, the normative standpoint, he will find that the de- 
 scriptions of mind which are made from the factual point 
 of view are no longer adequate or true. Nowhere is 
 this more clearly shown than in the consideration of the 
 unity of the mind which has been the constant theme of 
 this paper. For Mr. Thorndike the mind is very properly 
 a "sum total of an individual's feelings and acts," etc. 
 For certain other students who take the descriptive attitude, 
 it is possible to say: "We mean nothing more by the unity 
 of the mind than that it is not divided into faculties. The 
 term can be given no positive meaning whatever." But 
 just so soon as we take the point of view of the mental 
 processes as directed toward a goal, as doing well or ill a task 
 which they have undertaken, the unity of the mind appears 
 in a sense which is essential to the statement of the task of 
 the educator. That unity consists in the fact that each 
 thought, each idea, is not simply conjoined with its fellows 
 in a common receptacle, but that each is demanding of 
 the others that they be consistent with it if they are to be 
 held true and valuable in the experience of an individual 
 whose thoughts they are. From this point of view the self 
 is not a sum total: it is a unity. Its unity is that upon 
 every mental process within its experience there is laid the 
 same demand that it take its place in a system, and that it 
 submit to whatever transformations may be necessary 
 for its membership in that system. In a word, the unity 
 of the self is essentially a normative conception. In exactly 
 the same way as one may run through a book and find 
 simply words, may look at a picture and find only colors, 
 may listen to an organ and hear only sounds, so may one 
 run through the life of the self and find simply experiences. 
 But in no one of these cases have we taken the point of 
 view which is most closely related to the concrete affairs 
 of life, and in no one of them, therefore, have we included 
 all the truth which is vital. The student of education must 
 define his pupil primarily not from the factual point of 
 
IS MENTAL TRAINING A MTTH 133 
 
 view, but from the evaluative point of view. When he 
 does so define he will discover an experience whose unity 
 appears rather in its ideals than in its processes. In my 
 opinion he will find a unitary self, the training of whose 
 mental processes is not a myth. 
 
PART IV 
 THE CURRICULUM 
 
 THE three papers here given are extracts from reports 
 of the President to the Trustees of Amherst Col- 
 lege. They present definite proposals for the 
 organization of the course of study in a liberal college. 
 On the assumption that the purpose of liberal study is as 
 definite and as compelling as that of a professional school, 
 these reports condemn the theory of election in college 
 studies and demand that college instruction be fitted to 
 its purpose. They are not content with the establishing of 
 the mere possibility that an education may be secured in 
 college. They insist upon at least some measure of proba- 
 bility. 
 
 The report of 1914 contains a record of curriculum changes 
 adopted at Amherst College during the years 191 3 and 1914 
 and also a proposal of further action. The first of the 
 two extracts here given describes the most striking of the 
 changes which had been voted. The second extract is a 
 discussion of a tentative plan of a college curriculum as 
 a whole. 
 
 The report of 191 8 gives an account of developments in 
 educational discussion and policy in Amherst College since 
 191 2. Upon this account is based a proposal to reshape 
 the organization of the college teaching so as to adjust it 
 to its purposes. In the extract here given it is proposed 
 that the first two years of the course be sharply separated 
 from the last two and that each of these divisions be given 
 methods of teaching and examination suited to the work 
 which it has to do. 
 
 134 
 
A COURSE FOR FRESHMEN 
 
 THE most significant feature of the educational changes 
 which were put into effect in the fall of 1914 is the 
 placing of an elective course in social and economic 
 institutions in the Freshman year. The name of the course 
 has been left in vague outline because its exact nature must 
 be determined by the interest and method of the teacher 
 who gives it. Its purpose, whatever form it may take, 
 will be to serve as an introduction to the humanistic sciences. 
 We wish if possible to make students, at the very beginning 
 of the college course, aware of the moral, social, and economic 
 scheme — the society — of which they are members. Such 
 a course should not encourage boys to believe that they have 
 all at once found solutions of the problems by which their 
 elder brothers are sorely perplexed; nor should it cast 
 them down into the scepticism which regards all problems 
 as insoluble. Its functions are rather (1) a sane, searching, 
 revealing of the facts of the human situation, and (2) a 
 showing of the intellectual method by which these situations 
 may be understood. It should be primarily an introduction 
 to ethics, logic, history, economics, law, government, and 
 not in any large degree an end in itself. Such a course 
 presents many problems for the teacher; for the sake of 
 simplifying his task the course will be limited to members 
 of the Freshman class. 
 
 It is only fair that I say that many members of the 
 faculty and of the board of trustees regard this new Fresh- 
 man course as an experiment of rather doubtful wisdom. 
 Their chief objection is that boys in the first year of college 
 life are not ready for the examination of human living. 
 
 13s 
 
136 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 They believe that such studies cannot have the accuracy 
 nor the thoroughness which are needed to give the dis- 
 ciplinary quality which Freshman subjects should have. 
 They fear vagueness and incoherence of mental content 
 and looseness of intellectual method as a result of plunging 
 boys into situations by which all of us, young and old alike, 
 are baffled. 
 
 It would be idle to deny the force of this objection, and 
 so far as the objection holds, the new course is an experi- 
 ment. There are, however, considerations on the other 
 side and they seem to me so strong as to make it essential 
 that the course be given. 
 
 In the first place, I would suggest that incoherence and 
 looseness of intellectual method are better discovered at 
 the beginning of the college course than at its end. As our 
 curriculum is now given, one of the most common of its 
 results is that not until their college opportunities are 
 almost past do our boys come to realise what they ought 
 to be thinking about. Every year we send out, usually 
 among our best minds, boys who have at last come to aware- 
 ness of the human situation, but who have had no systematic 
 training in dealing with it. Such boys are dangerous to 
 themselves and to their fellows. Only in much greater 
 time and with far greater effort will they work out a method, 
 and a point of view, the beginnings of which at least they 
 might have secured during the college years. 
 
 Again, it is just this inexactness of content, this looseness 
 of method, which gives opportunity for the genuine teacher. 
 If the teaching be properly done boys will perceive that 
 their own thinking is a poor, silly, inept semblance of 
 activity. They will be brought to face the fact that before 
 the genuine human problems their information is scanty 
 and inexact, their reasoning confused and inconsistent. If 
 the teaching be properly done, the pupils will see what they 
 have to accomplish in the three remaining years. If the 
 teaching be not properly done — but it must be. 
 
 The simple fact is that at this point the progress of educa- 
 
A COURSE FOR FRESHMEN 137 
 
 tion is following the progress of the knowledge upon which 
 it depends. We have had no teaching in the humanistic 
 sciences because there were no such sciences. Our direct 
 understanding of human experience has been given on the 
 one hand through the appreciations and concrete represen- 
 tations of literature, and on the other, through relatively 
 inaccurate applications of philosophy and history. But 
 however unwilling we may be to recognize it, it is clear 
 that the new studies of human experience and activity 
 are now achieving in some measure the character of science. 
 In the beginnings of the intellectual life of Europe, our 
 first discovery was that certain quantitative aspects of 
 nature, admitting of mathematical expression, may thereby 
 be brought into order, subjected to the intellectual law. 
 It is not long since the activities of the living organism 
 seemed hopelessly incoherent and unorderable; but we 
 have succeeded and we are succeeding in dealing with them. 
 And now still later the processes and conditions of in- 
 dividual and social experience are being brought into some 
 sort of coherence and understanding. It is true that the 
 work has only just been begun — but it has been begun, 
 and no one can pretend to understand the thought of his 
 time who does not know what is being done and what 
 remains to be done in this field. If the college cannot give 
 our boys an acquaintance with this task and these achieve- 
 ments, if it cannot arouse a vital interest in the intellectual 
 struggle upon which we have entered, it will fail in one of 
 its most obvious and compelling duties. My own opinion 
 is that however difficult the task, our students should be 
 set to it at the beginning of the college course and should 
 be kept at it so long as, in college or out of it, the oppor- 
 tunities for study are still open to them. 
 
II 
 
 A CURRICULUM FOR A LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 WITH your permission, I should like to suggest, in 
 quite irresponsible fashion, the direction in which 
 it seems to me Amherst may wisely continue her 
 development. I am sure that, with the other liberal colleges 
 of her kind and time, she stands at the parting of the ways 
 and that critical problems are awaiting her decision. For the 
 sake of stimulating the friends of the college, students, 
 alumni, faculty, and trustees, to the discussion of principles 
 and methods, may I sketch here the outline of a curriculum 
 concerning which I have already had much discussion with 
 colleagues and students. The plan is offered not as a final 
 solution of our curriculum problems, but as a preliminary 
 statement of a point of view which, if valid, may perhaps 
 receive more adequate expression in other ways. It is offered 
 not for adoption but for criticism and consideration. 
 
 Freshman Year 
 
 Sophomore Year 
 
 Junior Year 
 
 Senior Year 
 
 Social and Economic 
 Institutions 
 
 European History 
 Philosophy 
 
 Science 
 Literature 
 
 American History 
 
 History of 
 Thought 
 
 Intellectual and 
 Moral Problems 
 
 Mathematics and 
 Formal Logic 
 
 Elective Major 
 
 Science 
 English 
 
 Elective Minor 
 Elective Minor 
 
 
 Foreign Language 
 
 Elective 
 
 
 
 
 As an invitation to discussion, I should like to say a few 
 words about several features of the plan as it is proposed. 
 
 138 
 
A CURRICULUM FOR A LIBERAL COLLEGE 139 
 
 I will describe briefly each of the courses, indicate their 
 relations to each other, attempt to formulate the under- 
 lying principles, and then speak of some advantages which 
 might follow if the plan were adopted. 
 
 In the list of courses as given those above the lines are 
 required, five in the Freshman, four in the Sophomore, 
 two in the Junior, and one in the Senior year. The courses 
 below the lines are elective, one for Sophomores, two for 
 Juniors, and one for Seniors. In the Freshman year, the 
 courses in foreign language and mathematics and logic 
 should be given more time value than the other courses of 
 the same year. In the Junior year, each course counts for 
 a quarter of a year's work. In the Senior year, the required 
 course takes one third of the time and the elective major 
 two thirds of the time. 
 
 The course in social and economic institutions has already 
 been explained. It should serve as an introduction to the 
 humanistic sciences. The student should be made aware 
 of the situations and the institutions with which those 
 sciences are dealing and should be made ready to attempt 
 an understanding of what they have done and are doing. 
 
 The course in mathematics and formal logic should give 
 instruction and practice in deductive thinking. Mathe- 
 matics and formal logic are alike interested in the endeavor 
 to find forms of expression by the use of which meanings may 
 be made more exact and more explicit. They alike recog- 
 nize the fact that our deductive thinking is engaged in the 
 task of giving to thought contents new forms of expression 
 by which they may become better understood. In the course 
 in question, the student should be instructed concerning 
 this characteristic function of mental activity and should 
 then be given practice in it. In geometry he will see how 
 in the field of space relations meaning is developed by new 
 modes of expression; algebra will give skill in the use of 
 symbolic representations of various types; formal logic 
 will build up the technique of accurate and coherent ex- 
 pression by means of words. Such a course, following the 
 
i 4 o THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 mathematics of the preparatory school, should give a student 
 some acquaintance with and command of the formal pro- 
 cedure of thinking. 
 
 The Freshman and Sophomore years have each a course 
 in physical and natural science. My own preference would 
 be that in each year two sciences be given (a semester for 
 each), so that for all students there would be some knowl- 
 edge of physics, chemistry, geology, and biology. For any 
 proper understanding of the conditions of human living all 
 four of these studies seem very desirable. My scientific 
 friends, with their ideals of thoroughness and close contact 
 with the facts, tell me that half year courses in science can 
 give only smatterings and hazy outlines and are hardly 
 worth offering. On this point I am inclined to differ with 
 them. What we want for our required courses is not the 
 technique of investigation, but an account of the results so 
 far as they are significant for life and for knowledge as a 
 whole. Such results can be given in words and, if properly 
 organized, it would seem that they might be given in such 
 form as to remain a valuable and significant possession. If 
 my friends are right, we might have to offer students in 
 one year a choice between physics and chemistry, and in 
 the other between geology and biology. If they are wrong, 
 we might give all four sciences in outline and in relation 
 during the two years. 
 
 With regard to the teaching of English, one hesitates 
 at the present time to dogmatise. Our teachers of English 
 are attempting to carry on and to combine two processes, 
 each of which is by itself sufficiently difficult. They are 
 seeking to make sure that students can express themselves 
 in simple grammatical form. They are also offering to 
 students an opportunity to enjoy the experience of literary 
 appreciation. One can only say that to these tasks and 
 their combination must be set the strongest and best 
 equipped teachers who are available. 
 
 The course in foreign language should be a continuation 
 of an advanced language presented for admission. It 
 
A CURRICULUM FOR A LIBERAL COLLEGE 141 
 
 should give to the student the experience of really reading 
 a language other than his own. As noted before, it should 
 have more time value than is now commonly allowed for 
 a three hour course. Like the English course, it should 
 have value in content as well as in the structure of the 
 language concerned. As it is to continue a subject pre- 
 sented for admission, one cannot determine its content 
 without determining also the admission requirements. 
 My own suggestion would be that we require for admission 
 six year courses in language, three in an ancient language 
 and three in a modern language. We could then require 
 that the ancient language be continued in the Freshman 
 year, and that the student be required to show by exami- 
 nation his reading command of the modern language. 
 Before this matter is decided, however, we need more 
 information concerning the value of different entrance 
 subjects. Such information we hope to secure before 
 another year has passed. 
 
 In the Sophomore year, European history traces through 
 the civilization of Europe the development of the institu- 
 tions revealed in the course in social and economic institu- 
 tions. The course in philosophy, chiefly logic and ethics, 
 studies the human motives and beliefs which underlie those 
 institutions and have found expression in them. The work 
 in science continues that already begun. In literature, 
 the student continues one of the literatures of the Freshman 
 year, English or foreign, according to his choice. 
 
 In the Junior year, the first course continues the historical 
 study from Europe into the development of our own insti- 
 tutions. Meanwhile, the history of thought attempts to 
 reveal in their successive forms the beliefs and purposes 
 which have dominated our civilization, and correlates with 
 these the scientific interpretations and, so far as possible, 
 the literary representations in which human life has been 
 portrayed. This course would be, in its own measure, 
 an account of the intellectual and moral elements in the 
 development of our civilization. 
 
i 4 2 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 In the Senior year, the student would be expected to 
 bring together the contributions of the two required Junior 
 courses in order that he may face the characteristic and 
 significant problems of his time and people. The study 
 of European and American institutions in their develop- 
 ment, and of the thought elements underlying and deter- 
 mining them, should have prepared him to form some 
 opinions of his own about human living. I do not mean 
 that he should be given a course in dogmatic citizenship, 
 but I do mean that the religious, moral, political, social and 
 economic issues of our day should be so presented and 
 interpreted that a young man may begin to understand 
 them, may begin to define his own thoughts on human 
 problems in relation to the thoughts which other men have 
 made and are making. Such a course could not be given 
 by one teacher. It would be necessary to place in charge 
 of it a number of teachers who might supplement each 
 other, teaching by their differences as well as by their 
 agreements. 
 
 On the elective side, the plan allows one free elective in 
 the Sophomore year in order that a student may be free to 
 carry on some special interest from the Freshman to the 
 later years. Thus he may take a second language or con- 
 tinue his mathematics, or go on with his work in some other 
 department within which his special interest lies. In the 
 Junior year, which is divided into four courses, two of these 
 are open to choice without limitation. In the two earlier 
 years, all the different lines of study have been opened up 
 and the student may now select two of them for careful 
 and detailed study under close supervision and in small 
 classes. In the Senior year, the major, taking two thirds 
 of the student's time, must be a continuation of one of the 
 four subjects of the Junior year. Here again the work 
 would be done in small groups in close association with a 
 teacher or group of teachers. In the two years taken 
 together it would amount practically to a full year's work 
 in a subject to which the student had already been intro- 
 
A CURRICULUM FOR A LIBERAL COLLEGE 143 
 
 duced in the early part of his college life. If the student 
 has within him capacity for any special interest he should 
 find in such genuine "majoring" at the end of his college 
 course, conditions favorable for awakening the interest to 
 full activity and for developing power in furthering it so 
 far as we may fairly expect it to go during the undergraduate 
 years. 
 
 Before proceeding to speak of the relations of courses, 
 may I stop to note the omission of two subjects for which 
 so. or ^ jrovision must be made. I refer to the teaching of 
 tru\^ j arts, including music, and to practice in public 
 speech These subjects are left out because the plan is as 
 yet a mere sketch. In any definite scheme they must be 
 firmly established in some way or other. 
 
 With regard to relations between courses, may I call 
 attention to the continuity in the series of required courses 
 and in the sequence of elective courses as well. The re- 
 quired studies running through the four years form one 
 continuous intellectual inquiry. The courses in history 
 treat of the institutions revealed in the Freshman year, 
 and the Senior course discusses the problems for which 
 history has furnished material. The Freshman courses in 
 institutions and mathematics and logic lead directly into 
 the study of logic and ethics, which in turn leads into the 
 history of thought, which again gives another body of con- 
 tent for the Senior course in problems. The courses in 
 science lead into the history of thought, and the studies 
 in literature give content for both historical subjects of the 
 Junior year. In the Senior year, the entire curriculum, 
 with its information, its problems, its methods, should be 
 brought to bear upon the interpretation of a group of prob- 
 lems which are all bound together by their common human 
 interest. In the field of electives, the same relationship 
 holds so far as possible. The Senior major continues one 
 of the Junior subjects, which is itself a continuation of work 
 done in the earlier years. 
 
 It would be essential to the working out of such a plan 
 
i 4 4 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 that the college student should, at the beginning of his 
 studies, be informed of the general plan and outline of the 
 curriculum. To the Freshman class there should be given 
 a series of lectures which would sketch the course of study- 
 as a whole, giving its essential purposes and determining 
 the relations of each study to the other studies and the 
 curriculum of which they are parts. Such lectures if 
 properly given would illumine and direct the instruction 
 and study from beginning to end. They would provide 
 a plan which every teacher and every pupil might be^x- 
 pected to keep in mind. ed 
 
 With respect to inclusiveness, the required confLnt is 
 intended to be representative of the system of human 
 knowledge as a whole. Recognizing the limitation of time 
 in four years of undergraduate study, it attempts to select 
 the significant intellectual inquiries and to so relate them as 
 to keep the unity of the whole while establishing acquaint- 
 ance with the parts. The task is not an easy one and there 
 is wide room for differences of opinion. But to do it in 
 some way is better than not to do it at all. One can simply 
 formulate one's notion and then submit it to friends and 
 colleagues for rending and reconstruction. 
 
 The fundamental purpose of the plan is to ensure that 
 every student who receives a liberal degree shall have gone 
 through an intellectual procedure by which a liberal educa- 
 tion may be secured. We are not content with the assur- 
 ance that he has been for four years in an institution within 
 which the opportunities of liberal culture are available. We 
 prefer an arrangement by which those opportunities are 
 made requirements. Then, recognizing the artificiality of 
 our tests, we may teach and test in the hope that what 
 is intended may be accomplished. 
 
 The same principle may be stated by saying that the 
 liberal college has a definite intellectual mission and it has 
 no right to give its degrees unless that mission has been 
 achieved. It is not enough that a student know a little of 
 everything; so far as it is possible, he should be given a 
 
A CURRICULUM FOR A LIBERAL COLLEGE 145 
 
 knowledge of the world, so extensive and so unified that by 
 means of it he may get a fair understanding of human 
 experience. It is not enough that he should have studied 
 one subject three years; he should go into one field and 
 learn how thinking is done in that field. I would define 
 the intellectually educated man as one who can bring a 
 unified interpretation of the world to bear on the problems 
 of human experience, and who also appreciates how thought 
 has achieved those results which have made his interpre- 
 tation possible. 
 
 Fi\ti the arrangement of courses here proposed there 
 would follow a number of advantages which are perhaps 
 worthy of mention. 
 
 One discouraging feature of our present work is that, 
 each course being regarded as complete in itself, the student 
 holds himself, or is held by us, responsible for being in- 
 formed concerning its content only on the day of exami- 
 nation. If at some later time we should call on him for 
 evidence of his knowledge of it, he would accuse us of 
 injustice and violation of all the presuppositions on which 
 his curriculum is built. But in the plan proposed, each 
 course given is itself an examination in the courses which 
 have been given before. If the teaching be properly done, 
 it will be taken for granted that the results of previous 
 courses are actually available for use, and if they are not 
 available, then the work of the later year cannot be 
 properly done. It would be interesting to see in this way 
 each professor examining the teachers who have preceded 
 him as well as the students immediately under his 
 charge. 
 
 Again, this arrangement would make it possible to take 
 cognizance of differences in content and method between 
 courses. As we have spread before students lists of courses 
 and have invited them to choose, we have inevitably come 
 to regard every course on the list as a substitute for every 
 other, and, therefore, as equivalent to it. The inevitable 
 result of this has been the establishment of false uniformities 
 
146 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 in methods of teaching. The teacher of literature and the 
 teacher of mathematics are each expected to take the same 
 amount of the student's time for study, to require classroom 
 attendance for the same number of hours per week, to give 
 the same kind of tests and examinations, to require the 
 same sort of "scholarly" work — to make sure that the 
 record of intellectual achievement in one course is a fair 
 substitute for the record in another. But I think it is 
 obvious that such uniformities and substitutions are alto- 
 gether illusory. Valuable instruction may be given in 
 subjects which admit of little work on which the student 
 can be "tested." And there are other lines of study in 
 which the teacher's activity may be practically limited to 
 examining what the student has done. Some courses 
 should claim little of a student's time outside the classroom; 
 others can make use of far greater assignments than are 
 now possible under our system of equivalents. But if we 
 were teaching under such a system of requirements as is 
 here proposed, the total demand upon the student might 
 be compounded of whatever parts might seem best. One 
 would give students work to do, not to keep them busy, 
 but because the work is worth doing. And if one had noth- 
 ing for them to do at any specific time, one could arrange 
 with one's colleagues to fill up the gap. 
 
 Still another advantage for the teacher would appear 
 in the uniformity of his class. Under the usual elective 
 scheme, one may find Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors 
 in the same classroom. And again, within each of these 
 groups there may be every possible variation of previous 
 study and preparation. It follows from this that in the 
 conduct of the work neither teacher nor pupil can take 
 anything for granted. And in this way it comes to pass that 
 each subject is taught without regard to any other, as a 
 thing complete in itself, except as each teacher attempts by 
 way of introduction some hasty establishment of relations. 
 This may be the teaching of "subjects" but it does not 
 give knowledge in any genuine or fundamental sense. 
 
A CURRICULUM FOR A LIBERAL COLLEGE 147 
 
 On the side of the students, the plan has an advantage 
 which is very important. It would unite all the college 
 in a common intellectual enterprise. The modern college 
 has lost for its study and teaching the tremendous social 
 sanction which in the old college was given by the sense 
 of intellectual solidarity. Under the elective scheme, no 
 subject is essential. Why study physics hard when other 
 students are getting an education without it? Why, if 
 you are seeking for a liberal education, devote yourself to 
 n -subject, without which other men are reaching the same 
 goal Yor which you strive? The argument is bad but none 
 the less convincing. But we must bring back to our stu- 
 dents the conviction that they have a common intellectual 
 task, that the college has a definite and compelling mission, 
 to which as members of the group they owe loyal and 
 enthusiastic devotion. Let us say it again — our work is 
 as definite as that of technical or professional school; it 
 can rightly claim equal earnestness and greater eagerness 
 and enthusiasm. 
 
 On the purely mechanical side, the plan has the advan- 
 tages of simplicity. It reduces the number of courses and 
 so makes much more easy the arrangement of schedule 
 and all related matters. It would enable us to adjust the 
 sizes of divisions for instruction on some reasonable basis. 
 At present the size of a class is commonly dependent simply 
 on the number of students electing the subject. But if 
 courses were required of all students, divisions could be 
 arranged in each case to suit the nature of the work done. 
 One of our popular fallacies is that there is a certain proper 
 size for a college class. But it is clearly untrue. If a 
 teacher is merely lecturing or reading there is virtually no 
 limit of numbers except the extent of the teacher's personal 
 power. If one is directing a piece of investigation, each 
 student must be taken separately. And between these 
 limits there are many adjustments to be made varying with 
 the nature of the subject and the method of the teacher. It 
 would conduce both to economy and to efficiency if these 
 
148 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 adjustments could be made by choice and not by the mere 
 chance of student election. 
 
 My impression is that in every phase of our intellectual 
 work teachers and pupils alike would be helped by greater 
 definiteness in understanding of the work in which we are 
 engaged. It would help us all to realize that we are not 
 simply giving or taking courses, but are engaged in a process 
 of education. In the face of a real unity in that process, 
 many of our distinctions, in the ranks of the faculty as well 
 as among the students, would seem arbitrary and artificial 
 
 On the elective side, the plan would have two advan- 
 tages. It would put an end to the mere gathering up of 
 unrelated courses from which can be gained little more than 
 a smattering of knowledge. For this it would substitute 
 the choice of a definite intellectual field and would try to 
 ensure that in this field the student should do a piece of 
 thorough, sustained, and systematic study. Such a "major- 
 ing" in the Junior and Senior years might be expected to 
 establish (i) habits of intellectual work, and (2) an intel- 
 lectual interest which, whether or not sustained by pro- 
 fessional activity, would remain as a permanent element of 
 culture and inquiry. 
 
 As I leave this proposed plan for your consideration, I 
 must apologize for saying so much concerning its supposed 
 advantages. May I say again that the plan is presented 
 simply for criticism, and its claims have been set forth in 
 the hope that counter claim and attack may reveal its 
 defects. The plan does express certain principles in which 
 I believe. But those principles are open to challenge. 
 And even if they were valid, it is clear that this embodiment 
 of them is a mere sketch which can become a plan only as 
 it is torn apart, put together again in new forms and with 
 needed supplementation, subjected to all the generous in- 
 terpretation and criticism which men give each other when 
 they are working together in a common cause which is 
 more important to them than is their own discussion of it. 
 
Ill 
 
 A REORGANIZATION OF THE COLLEGE 
 CURRICULUM 
 
 THIakc iger one attempts to devise a liberal training by 
 the additions and combinations of courses, the more 
 
 JL one becomes convinced that addition is an illusion 
 and that courses are the chimeras of an imagination pervert- 
 ed by the categories of mechanics. Twenty courses do not 
 make a college education any more than twenty legs make 
 a man, or twenty heads, or even ten hearts, two legs and 
 eight fingers. And in the same way three courses do not 
 make an intellectual interest, an experience of the actual 
 process of the working mind. Something is wrong with the 
 terms, something is radically wrong with the process of 
 combining them. 
 
 What is the trouble? It seems to me very clear that the 
 concepts of quantity and measurement have wrecked the 
 organic unity of the college course. In making elective 
 courses we have felt the genuine need of uniformity and so 
 have established units in terms of which to measure. And 
 having established our separate units of subjects, courses, 
 departments, we have felt free to pluck them out of the 
 living organism one by one, to substitute one for another, 
 and then to put them back supposing the life process to be 
 still rushing on in spite of all our interruptions. 
 
 If this be true, then no re-sorting of the courses will gain 
 the ends we seek. Rather, it seems to me, we must re- 
 think our terms and reconsider our procedure. I am 
 inclined, therefore, to recommend to the Trustees and 
 Faculty of the college a fairly fundamental transformation 
 of its organization. You will not find in this suggestion 
 
 149 
 
150 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 the slightest hint of any change of purpose. You will, 
 however, find a strong conviction that the college organiza- 
 tion in which that purpose finds expression is quite inade- 
 quate. I am proposing, therefore, that a new one take its 
 place. 
 
 As we have postulated two aims in the defining of a 
 liberal education, so I would, in good mechanical form, 
 propose the division of the college into two separate colleges, 
 a Junior and a Senior College. And if it be at oiye retorted 
 that this is a vicious mechanical separation in purpose _a«d 
 in method, then I would reply that the division into two, 
 if discreetly made, is not so bad as a division into twenty, 
 and further that, in spite of bad appearances, this division 
 of ours is not to be mechanical — never shall we take these 
 colleges apart or try to substitute them for one another in 
 any known relationship. 
 
 But now to state our plan in sober, honest terms! Our 
 purpose is, we say, to set men on the road toward liberal 
 education. And liberal education seems to have two 
 aspects: (i) that of general apprehension of the culture of 
 one's race and (2) that of feeling of the actual process of the 
 mind by which that culture has been made and still is in 
 the making. These aims are always present wherever a 
 liberal college is. But they are often obscure in content and 
 so hazy in outline as to be mistaken one for the other. Men 
 say "any course of study properly pursued is liberal" and 
 so they take some ten or twenty courses, each of necessity 
 improperly pursued and call the process liberal. Men 
 say "a little of everything and everything of something — 
 that gives a liberal education." But they forget that 
 knowledge when made up of "everythings" and "some- 
 things " is not real knowledge at all — not knowledge in 
 the sense of wisdom or of understanding, nor even knowl- 
 edge in the actual process of its making. 
 
 It seems to me essential that these two aims should be 
 kept clear and kept apart for fear that either may be lost 
 or either substituted for the other. I would propose, 
 
REORGANIZATION — COLLEGE CURRICUL UM 151 
 
 therefore, that we establish them and build them into the 
 very structure of the college course. Let us have two 
 colleges instead of one, or better two in one, the first ex- 
 plicitly devoted to the general aim, the second, in greater 
 part at least, given up to special studies, and both together 
 mastered by the common aim of trying to understand and 
 share the labor and ecstacy of human knowledge and 
 human apprehension. 
 
 How shall it be done? In its most external aspect the 
 college is, of course, an institution which, having instructed 
 students, or perhaps not having instructed them, examines 
 them in order to determine whether or not to give them a 
 degree which certifies that they are, in some sense agreed 
 upon, educated men. In this external sense, one college is 
 one set of examinations with all that thereunto belongs. 
 If then we should establish two examinations, two sets of 
 tests, we should in this external sense divide the four year 
 college into two parts, each of two years. From this 
 would follow various results as to our methods of teaching, 
 methods of study, methods of life. According as men are 
 to be examined so will their modes of living be. Two aims, 
 two sets of examinations; hence two colleges — that is 
 the program. 
 
 I would propose then that at the end of the sophomore 
 year we establish a set of tests or one comprehensive test 
 to determine whether or not in their two years of college 
 work our students have been making headway toward 
 intelligence, toward culture, toward an apprehension of 
 human knowledge as a whole. And at the end of the 
 senior year we should have a second test which, taking 
 the first for granted, should try to discover what students 
 know of some one field of knowledge, what work is done 
 within it and what it means. Passing the first examination 
 would give admission to the Senior College. Passing the 
 senior test would qualify a student for his degree. 
 
 It would be essential, I think, that such examinations be 
 set, not by the teachers who have given the instruction but 
 
152 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 by an examining board appointed for the purpose. Teachers 
 would still continue to give their tests at the endings of 
 courses, and passing one's courses might be made a pre- 
 requisite for admission to the general examination. And 
 the Board of Examiners might perhaps include some of the 
 teachers of the college whose work is being examined. 
 But in principle it seems to me courses and examinations 
 should be kept far apart. The Board should set its tests 
 not on the basis of courses taken but by the guidance of an 
 end to be achieved, a type of education to be realized. We 
 should examine the student, not his knowledge of the 
 courses he has taken. 
 
 I should like now to suggest some of the advantages 
 which it seems to me such an arrangement would bring 
 about in the two colleges which are established by it. 
 
 THE JUNIOR COLLEGE 
 
 The first advantage of the arrangement in the Junior 
 College would be the clarifying and validating of what the 
 college community means by culture. It would give to the 
 younger members of the community a compelling sense of 
 something that must be done, some quality that must be 
 taken on, some power that must be gained, some sensitive- 
 ness that must be won. There is now no such compelling 
 sense of common purpose and requirement in our conglom- 
 erate arrangement of courses. In a recent pronunciamento 
 of the largest association of colleges in the United States, 
 it was argued that since the concept of liberal education 
 has no generally accepted meaning, a given subject might 
 just as well be included in the college course as any other; 
 apparently no one could tell the difference in the result. 
 And if our college authorities are in a haze like this, there 
 is no wonder that freshmen and sophomores feel no com- 
 pulsion of a clear and definite purpose driving them on. 
 But we must have just that to make our college work 
 worth while — a recognition by us all that there are certain 
 
REORGANIZATION — COLLEGE CURRICULUM 153 
 
 things which one must know, must feel, must see, must 
 understand if he desires to be regarded as a member of this 
 community. Unless he does the things we do and loves 
 the things we love, he is not one of us. I think perhaps we 
 might regard the Junior College examinations as a matric- 
 ulation test, the college having given a man two years in 
 which to show that he may rightly claim a place as one who 
 is her own. 
 
 And may I hasten to say that the merit of such an exami- 
 nation as this would lie not in a great severity. I see 
 no reason why it should be in general quality harder than 
 any of the tests we give at present. The elimination of 
 many students by rigid tests might easily be done. But I 
 am not convinced that education by such elimination is the 
 thing most needed in the American colleges just now. There 
 would be much to be gained in private satisfaction and in 
 high quality of scholarly achievement by the elimination 
 of all students except the very best. But that is not the 
 gain most sorely needed at the present time. Our task, 
 the most important task, is that of taking the average 
 American boy and those above the average and trying to 
 make of them men of cultured power. No one doubts that 
 this work can be done for boys of unusual gifts and aptitude. 
 But what can be done in general? What are the possi- 
 bilities of cultural education in the country at large ? That 
 seems to me the urgent, the almost terrifying question 
 which now confronts our colleges of liberal education. 
 May I say again, therefore, that the merit of this examina- 
 tion would be, not in this or that established degree of 
 severity, but in the setting of a standard as such, in the 
 making clear that "liberal" has a meaning which cuts like 
 steel between the groups of those who are and those who are 
 not liberal sophomores. 
 
 At this point there is a question which I know is quite 
 inevitable. "Upon what subjects will you examine at the 
 end of the sophomore year? The student has passed his 
 courses one by one and answered questions on them. Will 
 
154 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 you ask further questions on these courses? Will your 
 examination mean a grand and general review?" May I 
 try to answer the question in two parts, distinguishing 
 between the method and the content of the mind with which 
 the examination is to deal? 
 
 If we were examining the intellectual method of a soph- 
 omore to see what sort of man he is there are, I think, 
 seven main questions which we should like to ask: 
 
 1. Can he and does he read books? 
 
 In books is gathered up the culture and knowledge 
 of the race. A boy who has not learned to go to 
 them, to live in them, to understand their meanings, 
 is not, in method at least, upon the great highroad 
 of education. 
 
 2. Can he express his own thoughts in writing? 
 
 3. Can he speak clearly and accurately? 
 
 4. Can he listen to and understand another's speech? 
 
 5. Has he a sense of fact, distinguishing from facts the 
 
 mere suggestions which are not yet established? 
 
 6. Can he derive an implication, draw an inference, and 
 
 see what implications and inferences do not follow? 
 
 7. Has he a sense of values by which to feel, to appreciate, 
 
 to recognize the things worth while from those not 
 worthy of our choosing? 
 
 These are, so far as method is concerned, the questions 
 I should like to ask about a sophomore seeking admission 
 to a Senior College. They indicate the qualities of mind 
 which make for education. If one has gained these quali- 
 ties I think we might admit him to special studies of a 
 liberal sort. If not, it is a sin to let him think, however 
 many courses he has passed, that he is on the road to liberal 
 education. 
 
 And on the side of content we should again try to discover 
 not so much what he has done with courses as what courses, 
 and growing, and being himself, have done to him, what 
 sort of man he is becoming. He should be examined upon 
 
REORGANIZATION — COLLEGE CURRICULUM 155 
 
 his knowledge of literature, of natural and humanistic 
 science, should be expected to know the essential things in 
 them which are the common stock of men who are trying 
 to interpret the world in which they live. And further, he 
 should appreciate and understand in some degree the pur- 
 poses and attitudes of men of letters, of scientists, and other 
 thinkers, should know what tasks they undertake, what 
 methods they adopt, what results they have achieved, 
 and what, in general outline, they now propose to do. 
 Such an examination would require knowledge of the 
 subjects taught and studied in the courses, but it would 
 imply as well a student's independent reading and thinking 
 about his subjects. It would, I think, relegate the courses 
 to their proper place as moments in a process of acquisition 
 and understanding, a process which every student must be 
 carrying on himself, a process which the entire community 
 accepts as that by which it seeks its purpose of liberal 
 education. 
 
 Such an examination could not be given by one man nor 
 in one day. It would require a Board of Examiners and 
 would inevitably extend over two, three, or four weeks. 
 It would include written examinations, tests, reports, con- 
 ferences. It would put into explicit and regular form such 
 queries and associations as one would wish to have with a 
 young man whose intellectual and personal quality one 
 might wish to determine. 
 
 But now to return to the listing of the advantages of 
 the Junior College examination! We have said that over 
 against the separate courses it would set up the demand 
 of the college as a whole for Tightness of method and Tight- 
 ness of content in the teaching and study. There are some 
 other advantages perhaps not so important. 
 
 I think the improvement which would be brought to 
 sophomore study would be very great. The sophomore 
 is our least responsible student. The enthusiasm and the 
 docility, perhaps, of the freshman year have somewhat 
 lessened. The ending of the college course is still three 
 
156 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 years away. The goal toward which it leads is far and 
 indistinct. The sophomore is not under pressure. Such 
 a test as we have outlined, expressing a demand that must 
 be met at the ending of the year, summing up the activities 
 of the two years in one compelling purpose and interest — 
 such a test would in my opinion transform the sophomore 
 year. If so, it would give gain where now our loss is great- 
 est. For many students it would prevent the breaking 
 down of the college course. 
 
 Another gain would be, I think, that of placing upon the 
 student the responsibility for the getting of his own edu- 
 cation. The college would give no guarantee that courses 
 would cover all the content of the general examination. 
 In the last resort, a student should find out for himself 
 what demands the community lays upon him; he should 
 see that the doing of daily tasks assigned with daily regu- 
 larity is good but childish. He should undertake to make 
 himself what the college approves, should use his courses 
 and his own self-directed studies as instruments for getting 
 ready for the tests which the college is to give him. In 
 the years from eighteen to twenty-three one should be 
 getting something of the self-reliance of a man. Our 
 present procedure tends too much to keep the students 
 young in will as well as in intelligence. 
 
 Still another gain would come in the relations of teachers 
 and students. The present process tends toward being 
 one of handing out and then demanding that the thing 
 received be given back again. The teacher is at the same 
 time examiner. But if teacher and pupil were alike pre- 
 paring for a distant test which neither is to set, there would 
 be more of comradeship, of teaching and discipleship than 
 we have now. 
 
 I hesitate to speak of gains so far as teaching is concerned, 
 for, out of my own experience if in no other way, I know 
 how jealous teachers are of their independence, how much 
 they cherish their sovereign right to teach as they think 
 best. And in a certain field of their relations I would not 
 
REORGANIZATION — COLLEGE CURRICUL UM 1 57 
 
 yield to any one in fighting for the teacher's independence. 
 But independence at this other point of which we speak 
 is nothing else than anarchy. May I then suggest two 
 gains that might be won for teaching. 
 
 First, I think that the separate courses taken by any 
 student for a common test would find proper relation to 
 each other just through their common relation to the 
 common test. Each course would find itself called upon 
 to play its proper part, each teacher would need to know 
 what other teachers were doing, each would assume the 
 work of other teachers as joining with his own. At present 
 one teacher knows another's work by gossip, often by idle, 
 inaccurate gossip of undergraduates, hardly ever, if at all, 
 by genuine conference. A demand of unified knowledge 
 accepted as the standard of the Junior College, enforced 
 by an examination for membership in the community, 
 would bring about, I think, some understanding of the 
 common task and hence relating of the various parts within 
 the unity to which they all belong. 
 
 Another gain for teachers would be that in some measure 
 their teaching would be tested. On the whole it is not 
 good for any man to keep on doing work on which no ade- 
 quate judgment of approval or disapproval is ever passed 
 by competent authority. The tests implied in student 
 popularity, in the number of student elections in one's 
 courses, in the promotions or refusals of promotion decreed 
 by trustees and presidents, these do not satisfy our college 
 teachers. They have many, many better reasons for dis- 
 gruntlement. But one important cause of discontent lies, 
 I think, just in the lack of any sense of right appraisal of 
 their work. The men who publish find their judgment 
 among their fellow scholars who do not hesitate to speak 
 their minds. But men who teach mark their own teaching. 
 It takes a fair amount of self-esteem to keep one's courage 
 up. And so I think that an objective test would give relief 
 and on the whole much satisfaction. 
 
 I am sure that there would be great gain in the separating 
 
158 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 of Freshmen, Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors into distinct 
 groups in the arrangement of their courses. If only Soph- 
 mores were taking the courses of the second year, and if 
 all Sophomores had taken the same or equivalent courses 
 in the previous year, both teacher and pupil would profit 
 by the uniformity. The course could then be made to 
 lead from something in the past to something in the future. 
 It would not be a mere detached unmeaning fragment 
 beginning from so many different sources that it has no 
 common source at all, and leading into so many different 
 directions that the word direction loses its meaning. The 
 course would tend to be part of a scheme of training, a 
 common training for a group of men seeking the same end, 
 and hence following the same road and traveling together. 
 
 There would be, I think, distinct gain in administration, 
 in the simplification of arrangements of hours, schedules, 
 and other like matters. The separation of Freshmen and 
 Sophomores from upperclassmen in class enrollments would 
 give a genuine gain. If, as would be practically certain, 
 Freshmen and Sophomores were separated from each other 
 in the arranging of classes, our present difficulties as to 
 schedules would disappear. Perhaps in this way the 
 amount of administration in the colleges might be reduced. 
 I am sure that very much of the time of administrative 
 officers is spent in reconciling the conflicting desires of 
 anxious teachers. Strangely enough, it usually seems that 
 they, the administrative officers, have the desires from 
 which official denials spring. But in any case, probably 
 to the gratification both of teachers and officers, we might 
 in this way diminish administration. 
 
 For teachers and students then it seems to me the pro- 
 posal of a Junior College is worth considering. It would 
 pledge the community to an end and to a standard. If 
 successful, it would make the concept of general liberal 
 education a definite one. That concept is compelling 
 enough if only it is perceived and understood. If then, as 
 I think it would, this proposed arrangement should bring 
 
REORGANIZATION — COLLEGE CURRICULUM 1 59 
 
 our common purpose into clarity and definiteness, it would 
 set us on the road we seek and I am inclined to think that 
 we should travel it in gay and serious fellowship. 
 
 THE SENIOR COLLEGE 
 
 The determining motive of the Senior College would be 
 the second of our aims, to bring a student into actual con- 
 tact with the working minds by which the knowledge and 
 apprehension of mankind are made. This opportunity 
 would be open to men coming successfully from the Junior 
 College. Here they would find a greater freedom, greater 
 responsibility, and more urgent obligations. My impres- 
 sion is that corresponding to the improvement of attitude 
 in Sophomore year would come a definite gain for Juniors 
 and Seniors, first from the sense of freedom and personal 
 initiative and second from the compulsion of the higher 
 intellectual comradeship into which they are received. 
 
 In the Senior College a very considerable part of the 
 student's time would be given to one major interest. What 
 does this mean? It does not mean that the work would be 
 confined within what we now call a department. It does 
 mean a group of related studies, taken from several depart- 
 ments, but all bound together by some common interest 
 and so fusing together in terms of some central inquiry 
 or investigation. The nature of this would of course vary 
 with the field. 
 
 It does not mean that the student is to enter a profes- 
 sional school at the end of his Sophomore year. The col- 
 lege has given very few professional courses in the past and 
 my impression is that it will give fewer rather than more 
 of them in the future. I am not saying that a student's 
 choice of his major might not be influenced by the profession 
 which he has in view. Probably in many cases this would 
 happen. But I do mean that during the college years the 
 organization of the courses will be in terms of intellectual 
 interests and problems, not in terms of immediate practical 
 
160 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 pursuits for which specific preparation is needed. Here 
 of course is one of the great educational issues of our time 
 which I must not stop to consider at present. May I say- 
 simply that the policy of the college thus far seems clear 
 and definite upon the issue; we are a non-professional 
 college — but very practical. 
 
 But now positively, what does it mean? I am not willing 
 to dogmatise with great specification until we have had 
 further opportunity to examine the procedure of colleges 
 in which like experiments have been made. I am sure, 
 however, of several points. First, the major should be a 
 course of study arranged under the direction of one teacher 
 or a small group of teachers in related fields. Second, it 
 should be regarded, not as a group of lectures or courses to 
 be taken, but as a study or reading or investigation carried 
 on by the student, to which the lectures of teachers contrib- 
 ute so far as may be. Third, it should have such unity as 
 to admit of a single test upon it all at the close of the course. 
 Fourth, it should be pursued more informally than our 
 present courses, but under the immediate direction of some 
 teacher, acting individually or as representative of a group. 
 Fifth, it should culminate in some report, some thesis, or 
 record of investigation, or in an examination which should 
 give final evidence of the student's ability and achievement. 
 Sixth, the doing of satisfactory work in such a major field 
 should be required for a degree. 
 
 There are two beliefs involved in this proposal. First, 
 Juniors or Seniors in college are or can be made mature 
 enough in mind and purpose to take on genuine intellectual 
 responsibilities; it is a sin to keep them children. Second, 
 such intellectual responsibility calls for a different, a more 
 informal relationship between teacher and pupil than is 
 desirable in the earlier years. 
 
 Such a majoring plan would again postulate a scheme of 
 independent examination for the testing of results. There 
 would not be, of course, such general examining as that 
 upon the work of the Junior College. But there ought to be 
 
REORGANIZATION — COLLEGE CURRICULUM 161 
 
 in each field the submitting of the evidence of the student's 
 work to some independent and recognized authority in that 
 field for judgment of its worth. The student should be 
 informed and record made that he has or has not done 
 something which men of his years and opportunities may 
 reasonably be expected to do. 
 
 It is hardly necessary, I think, to speak of the advan- 
 tages of such an arrangement. The values to students 
 and teachers alike are clearly obvious. For students, the 
 greater freedom, the close association with a small group of 
 men of like interest, the immediate acquaintance with and 
 direction by a small number of teachers, the demand upon 
 one's powers which comes from the acceptance of a definite 
 task, all these would stimulate as well as enlighten the 
 student mind. For the teachers, the reduction of the 
 amount of formal instruction would be a gain. There 
 would be danger that much time would be taken in informal 
 instruction but this would be so much more near to the 
 teacher's own study that it might in many cases be of help 
 rather than a hindrance to scholarly pursuits. Certainly 
 there would be more of genuine satisfaction in it. 
 
 The real question as to such a plan is not, Is it desirable? 
 but, Can it be made to work? And the question is not one 
 to be evaded. But my own conviction is very strong that 
 the thing can be done. I am certain that it ought to be 
 tried. It is better to see what can be accomplished along 
 such a line than to wait ignobly for some one else to make 
 the attempt. As Socrates, in Plato's Euthydemus, when 
 told that in the process of becoming wise a man must lose 
 his ignorant life, ofFers himself for sacrifice, so may the 
 college do. A death like that would be a noble ending, 
 the sort of ending from which many splendid enterprises 
 have sprung. 
 
 I have spoken of the "major" interest in the Senior 
 College. It seems clear that this interest should not claim 
 all of a student's working time. Until our plans for majors 
 are made more definite, one cannot tell just what the 
 
162 THE LIBERAL COLLEGE 
 
 minor arrangement should be. I would suggest, however, 
 that three fourths of the time be given to the major and 
 one fourth reserved for the minor interests. In this case 
 it would be necessary to provide in the Senior College 
 courses for men not majoring in the fields in which they 
 lie. It would be essential also to provide that the minors 
 be taken outside the major fields. I should not now be 
 willing to go so far as in the Report of 1914, requiring all 
 students to take, in junior year, the history of thought and 
 American history, and in the senior year, intellectual and 
 moral problems. But it would seem to me essential that 
 the general interest which controls the Junior College 
 should not be wholly put aside. At least we should main- 
 tain a balancing of interest by requiring study outside the 
 major field. It would not do to let our special study drive 
 away the fundamental aim which we would make it serve, 
 the aim of so knowing and feeling our human life and men's 
 interpretations of it that one is free in living it. We must 
 remain in general apprehension as well as in special study 
 a liberal college. 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 There are many details to be worked out before such a 
 reorganization as I have proposed could be adopted. The 
 most fundamental and the most difficult is that of the 
 establishing of Examining Boards wholly or in part distinct 
 from the teaching faculty. This separation of the two 
 functions of teaching and examining is not in one sense 
 essential to the plan. Clearly the Junior and Senior Col- 
 leges could be set apart each with its own peculiar work, 
 each with its own preliminary and final examinations — 
 this could be done without so sharp a separation between 
 teaching and examining. And yet the separation is sug- 
 gested by the plan and would in my opinion contribute 
 largely to its success. How far are we willing to go along 
 this line? Are we ready to establish two Boards of Ex- 
 aminers correlative with the teaching Faculty? If so, 
 shall the Faculty participate in the appointment of such 
 
REORGANIZATION — COLLEGE CURRICULUM 163 
 
 Boards, or shall it be wholly in the hands of the Trustees 
 and President? This is a set of issues difficult to deal with. 
 They are to be met for the sake of the realizing of the pur- 
 pose of the college. 
 
 As I close this discussion, I can merely call attention to 
 important questions which are bound up with the project 
 which we have been considering. 
 
 The required studies of the Junior College would pre- 
 sumably not differ radically from the present requirements 
 of the first and second years. I think that we are approach- 
 ing settlement of the questions regarding the studies of 
 these years. 
 
 The reorganization proposed would have great effect 
 upon our dealings with the members of the Faculty, those 
 now with us as well as others to be appointed. For the 
 trying of a high experiment we must have men of high 
 ability and courage. It is the primary task of the college 
 to make its provision for teachers conformable to the 
 demands upon them. 
 
 There is no implication in the plan of any radical change 
 in our methods of admitting students. Such changes 
 might be suggested by later experience but they are not 
 apparent now. 
 
 Before such a plan could be put into operation it would 
 be essential that we make careful study of like attempts 
 in other institutions and in other countries. The most 
 radical change in the conduct of the teaching is in the 
 system of majoring in the Senior College. Here we must 
 go carefully but with not too much delay. 
 
 To sum it all up, may I say that the cause of liberal 
 education is crying aloud for intelligent and resolute sup- 
 port. It will not do just now to stand on the defensive. 
 Liberal teaching must be established. If this is to be done 
 we must go on; we are just emerging from a period of vast 
 confusion and distraction in educational theory and prac- 
 tice. It is a time for knowing what you propose to do and 
 how it is to be done, — and for doing it. 
 
A FINAL WORD 
 
 EVERY point of view is both negative and affirmative. 
 On the negative side it is a protest against other 
 opinions. On the affirmative side it is a realization 
 of its own meaning. As a last word, then, one may very 
 properly attempt to characterise the beliefs which one abhors 
 and the faith upon which one acts. 
 
 The underlying antipathy of these papers is directed 
 against specific devices in education. When we consider 
 the immense expenditure of time and ability devoted to our 
 educational machinery how shall we explain the general 
 ineffectiveness of its working ? The only explanation which 
 seems to fit the facts is that our various specific activities 
 are counteracting and nullifying each other. The cult of 
 the specific is always a dangerous one. He who seeks to 
 cure a specific evil by the application of a specific remedy, 
 without understanding both evil and remedy in wider 
 terms, invites disaster. Such cures create diseases greater 
 than those which they destroy. It has been recorded of a 
 certain man that after all his evils had been cleared away, 
 the latter state of that man was worse than the first. If 
 we would avoid such disastrous remedies as this we must 
 beware of mere devices: we must attempt to formulate 
 our task and our procedure, each as a whole. 
 
 On the positive side these papers have contended that 
 if one would know how knowledge is to be taught then one 
 must try to know what knowledge is. Just as a teacher 
 cannot bring a pupil near to learning unless he is near to 
 it himself, so one cannot understand the teaching process 
 unless one understands what it is that is to be taught. 
 Our teaching must be based upon a comprehension of what 
 learning is, of the nature of knowledge and of wisdom in 
 
 164 
 
A FINAL WORD 165 
 
 relation to human living. There is nothing more futile 
 than the attempt to teach liberal culture by means of 
 teachers who are not liberally educated. It is equally 
 futile to try to impart understanding of human life and of 
 the world if we are not ourselves striving for such under- 
 standing and making some progress toward its accomplish- 
 ment. In the last resort, let it be said again, it is the 
 purpose of education to make young people ready for 
 living human life in this world of theirs. In order to do 
 .that we must try to understand both them and their world. 
 On that endeavor we may found our attempt at Making 
 Minds, and so venture to enroll ourselves as members of a 
 Liberal College,