& l B
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.C. 33
/ "What Knowledge is of Most Worth.”
_AL INT –A-T) ID TER, IET S S
Delivered before the Alumni of Oberlin College,
J1 w g w st 4, 1868,
Ex-G or E R wo R. J. D. cox.
There has been much able discussion of late upon the merits of different
courses of study, and upon the principles which ought to determine us in select-
ing a curriculum for the education of our youth, especially in the higher schools
and colleges of the country.
Among the more noteworthy essays which the debate has produced, is a series
of articles by Herbert Spencer, commencing with one entitled “What knowledge
is of most worth.” The vigorous style of this writer and the considerable repu-
tation as a philosopher which he enjoys, have given wide influence to his opin-
ions in regard to the principles which lie at the bottom of all true efforts in edu-
cation. He has, besides, given an air of system to his examination, and clas-
sified the activities of human life and the ends at which education should aim,
<-- under so few heads as to make his argument a taking one if we give it only a
superficial examination; whilst the cleverness with which he has arrayed the
considerations which may be made to support his theories, makes it peculiarly
well adapted to mislead those who are upon the threshold of their education,
and to inspire them with an unjust contempt for the studies which have hitherto
had a large place in our institutions of learning.
I do not propose to discuss the details of a proper course of study, nor even
to enter into the general debate as to the relative worth of linguistic and scien-
tific studies. Were I to attempt it, I could do little more than borrow from the
admirable address of Stuart Mill before the University at Aberdeen, which, for
its characteristic lucidity of statement and convincing presentation of the val-
ues of different branches of learning, deserves to be in the hands of every stu-
dent and intelligent friend of education. My object is rather to imitate Mr.
Spencer's effort to get back of the question of specific studies, apd to discover,
if possible, the principles which may enable us to answer his question, “What
knowledge is of most worth 7” The scope of my plan will, without involving a
formal review of the essays to which I have referred, properly include an exam-
ination of some of his more fundamental propositions, and an inquiry into the
legitimacy of his deductions.
When we ask the relative worth of various kinds of knowledge, we necessa-
rily assume some standard of value or utility by which we test our answers to
1 -
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the question. The purpose or end of the knowledge must be determined before
we judge whether it be of much or little use in that regard. The knowledge
which would be of great use in trapping beaver, might be of no worth in coal
mining. Knowledge of music would be of no value in building a house, unless
some one could revive Orpheus' secret, and make the trees dance after his lute
and build themselves into a human habitation. Knowledge of banking would
be of no use in navigating a ship, nor would Bowditch's navigator be a guide
in railroading. Our question, then, must be answered, American fashion, by
asking another, viz.: “Of most worth for what purpose?” What end have we
in view and what aim have we, when we ask the relative value of knowledge?
Spencer has stated this end in a way that in itself would not be objectiona-
ble, when he says that it is “to live completely.” Indeed, if the full meaning
of the phrase be given it, and a “complete life” be made to include all that be-
longs to the ideal of a noble and perfected existence, I should accept the state-
ment, and say that the end and object of all education had been well expressed.
When we look further into the essay we are considering, however, and notice
the application the author makes of his principle, and his classification of the
human activities into which life is divided, and to which education is to be ap-
plied, we find our ideal of a “complete life” very far from being realized, and
a low standard of utility, with a narrow reach and purpose, taking the place of
the high conception we had been led to expect. A well-developed physical
being is all that would seem to be properly included in his description; and the
culture, which directly aims at ennobling and expanding the human soul, is
either unprovided for, or thrust into so subordinate and unimportant a place as
to seem practically ignored. It is true that, by a happy inconsistency which
those who read Spencer's books can not fail to notice frequently, he is often
better than his own principles; but a foundation laid with the apparent care
which is evident in his introductory essay, will, from the systematic form into
which it is thrown, remain more firmly fixed in the reader's mind than any tacit
admissions or conclusions inconsistent with it, and it is, therefore, only the
more necessary to examine carefully this basis, and to expose what we may
deem its errors.
Spencer declares the following to be an arrangement, “in the order of their
Żmportance, of the leading kinds of activity which constitute human life " : 1.
Those activities which directly minister to self-preservation. 2. Those activi-
ties which, by securing the necessaries of life, indirectly minister to self-preser-
vation. 3. Those activities which have for their aim the rearing and discipline
of offspring. 4. Those activities which are involved in the maintenance of
proper social and political relations. 5. Those miscellaneous activities which make
up the leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of the tastes and feelings.
The education which prepares for each of these several activities is estimated
in importance according to the same relative order, and the classification is
made the foundation of the author's whole theory.
If it were only claimed that this is a chronological arrangement, showing the
order, ºn time, in which the activities of man are developed and his knowledge
acquired, although it would not even then be strictly true, it might be admitted
as to a portion of the classes, and the error contained in the proposition would
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not lead to mischievous consequences; but when the assertion is made that the
value and importance of education in these several respects are in the order of
the classification given; “that these divisions,” to use the author's language,
“subordinate one another in the foregoing order, because the corresponding
divisions of life make one another possible in that order,” the conclusion seems
to me to be one which is at variance with every true idea of education.
In arranging a scheme of study according to the value and importance of
different departments of it, the most important are not those which must neces-
sarily come first. The learning of the A B C must precede the reading of
books; but it would be a mere perversion of the use of language to say that,
therefore, the study of the alphabet is of the most value in literary education.
In accomplishing all valuable results and reaching desirable ends, successive
steps must necessarily be taken, and the end could never be reached but by
taking each in its turn. But these means, however necessary, are necessary
only as means, and it is absurd to say that they are more important than the
end for which alone they are devised and used. Yet this is precisely Spencer's
argument. Because life and the procuring of the necessaries of life must pre-
cede the cultivation of the mind in everything that is true, beautiful, and good,
therefore the knowledge which we may possess in common with the lowest
brutes that perish, namely, that of the means of sustaining mere physical ex-
istence, is most valuable and important, and should have the most prominent
place in our plans of education. The statement of the doctrine is its own refu-
tation.
It is noticeable that such a scheme leaves no room for the larger kind of util-
ity which estimates knowledge of any sort as valuable for its own sake—which
recognizes in the consciousness of mental or moral growth the fullest possible
justification of the labor by which such growth was attained. A low calculation
of its use for mere physical and material advantages is all that is provided for,
unless the last and least important of the five divisions, that which refers to the
“leisure part of life, devoted to the gratification of the tastes and feelings,” may
be regarded as leaving a place for the cultivation of knowledge because it is
ennobling, purifying, and exalting in its tendencies. If science of any kind is
of use in procuring the necessaries of life, its worth as science is treated as
nothing compared with the bread which it assists in obtaining. The first and
most important divisions of knowledge are declared to be such as tend to the
preservation of life, because mere physical support has been assigned the like
preeminence in the scale of human activities. Thus the Scripture is reversed,
and Christ's injunction to “take no thought what ye shall eat” is supplanted by
the doctrine that meat and raiment are the most important of all things, and
are to have the chief place in our thoughts and studies.
But before entering further into an examination of the consequences of such
a theory, let us return to the starting place and endeavor to obtain clear ideas
of the “complete life” which we should aim at, and which our education should
directly tend to produce.
Every rational being before whose sight the image of an ideal man has once
been exhibited, gets by the mere contemplation of it an appreciation, more or
less adequate, of its nobleness and attractiveness, and ever afterward the voice
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of conscience within him urges him to make his own character and life accord
with that model. Whatever be our philosophical theories, we must admit the
fact to be that the idea in morals, in intellect, and in art is so related to our
faculties that our approval of it and our pleasure in it are inevitable, and that
from the time of our perceiving and comprehending it, it somehow becomes to
us a law governing our judgment of ourselves; and we approve or condemn our
own conduct, our intellectual culture, and our taste, as these harmonize or are
discordant with this standard which reason sets up within us. It is not neces-
sary for our present purpose to go behind the fact or to sound the deep mystery
of the philosophy of this law. It is enough to recognize the truth that our
minds are actually so constituted, that the ideal in each of the three realms I
have named, commands our admiration and homage, if we will only gaze upon
its perfections, and allow its beauties to have their natural and legitimate effect
upon us. - w
Thus, in art, you may take a youth bred in the backwoods, who has never
seen a picture better than a coarsely daubed lithograph, or a statue superior to
the wooden Indian which answers for a village tobacconist's sign, yet you may
place him before the masterpieces of the world's great artists with absolute
assurance that if he will only gaze intelligently upon them and compare them
with what he has formerly seen, a sense of their noble beauty will gradually
penetrate his mind, and his standard of taste gradually but infallibly approxi-
mate to that which the civilized world has reached through its highest cultiva-
tion. He may be hardly conscious of the change as it goes on within him, but
after becoming familiar with lovely forms and exquisite coloring, he will be
amazed that he could ever have derived gratification from the rude efforts in art
which charmed his boyish and uncultivated fancy. In different persons this
process may vary in rapidity, but it is the same in character, and we test the
healthiness of the mental organization by the certainty of the result. If we
find at the first experiment that the mind does not respond to the beauties
placed before it, we only say, “Look again, study what you see, and the revela-
tion of glory is sure to come.”
In the same way, moral beauty is its own criterion, and when made known to
us, becomes evermore the standard of our self judgment and the test of our
conscience. In this case, as in the other, it is not necessary for our purpose to
inquire why an act is morally beautiful or noble; it is enough that the healthy
mind recognizes it as such. It may be that its beauty depends upon its per-
ceived harmony with the universal order of things. That reason shows it to
accord with the good of all sentient beings; that the Creator has given us a
moral sense which perceives rectitude as the sight perceives color; or that the
fiat of God has declared the right so that no finite being can dispute it. All these,
and other theories, we may safely leave to the discussion of the various schools
in ethics, of which they are the shibboleths. It is enough for us to know and
acknowledge the fact that as our aesthetic taste in art learns to recognize beauty
of form and color, so our moral perceptions by gazing upon moral beauties cer-
tainly come to recognize the charm of charity, the nobility of justice, and the
loveliness of love. In this regard, also, an ideal of life and conduct grows up
from our experience and observation, and becomes the goal of all our efforts at
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self-development, and the criterion by which we determine the worth of all
moral education.
So, likewise, there is a purely intellectual ideal, a standard of intellectual cul-
ture, a conception of fully developed mental power which is the model of the
mental man, and is more or less clearly defined in the mind of every intelligent
person. It is our notion of what is possible for such beings as ourselves, and
bears a similar relation to the actual human minds we know to that which the
Apollo Belvidere and the Venus of Milo bear to the bodies of the actual men
and women about us. It is an ideal in which strength of reason, keenness and
quickness of perception, logical analysis, delicacy of discrimination, sagacity of
inductive generalization, all combine to unite the best powers of all the greatest
intellects into one perfect and symmetric whole.
The combination of these three ideals of what is possible in the several de-
partments of intellect, of morals, and of art, makes the ideal man differing
from our conception of the Deity only in being finite whilst He is infinite. To
form this conception of a perfect being of our own nature is the peculiar privi-
lege of rational beings. Earnestly and diligently to work our way toward a
realization of it, letting our zeal in the struggle grow by what it feeds upon, and
being satisfied with the work of no day which has not helped us in our approxi-
mation to the perfection we covet, this is to lead a “complete life.” How best
to accomplish this, how to reduce to a minimum the obstacles which the belit-
tling cares of this world and the necessities of a mere struggle for life interpose,
how to make the ordinary labors of business conduce to the end we seek and
become part of the development and growth we long for, this is the work of
education, stated in its broadest form.
It will be seen at once, that if I am right in my conception of a complete life,
and of education as an instrument in the means of attaining it, the order of
importance in the several classes of knowledge stated by Mr. Spencer is nearly
reversed. It is the ideal in religion, morals, intelligence, art, remanded by him
to the fifth and lowest place in the scale of values as being only the occupation
of leisure hours, which we advance to the highest position and make the sub-
lime end for which the rest are only means and instruments. If to eat and
drink and then die were the whole of man, his existence would have no more
worth than that of a brute. On the hypothesis that no higher object is proposed
to human effort than to get the most out of physical life while it lasts, it would
be hard to show any sacredness attaching to man's life, and a Chinese passive
indifference to death would be the part of wisdom. Why need we care whether
we live or our neighbors live, if the simple support of life be the most impor-
tant of all our activities and the thing most worthy of our study and thought?
Our sympathies may revolt against the wanton infliction of pain, even upon an
insect; but we can not feel that it is an appreciable loss to the universe if a
worm dies out of it. Just in proportion as we lower the standard of human
career and lose sight of the ennobling parts of it, as we ignore the differences be-
tween man's higher life and that which is merely animal, we also diminish the
force of all reasons which make charity, benevolence, and neighborly help a
duty we owe to the suffering and the needy. It is in view of the possibilities
that may await the poorest and meanest of human souls that our consciences
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forbid us to look with indifference upon its destruction. In proportion as the
purpose to live nobly dies out of a man, and vice, fraud, or any degrading ten-
dency becomes the rule of his life, our concern for his existence dies out also,
and the common idiom of our language expresses the natural sentiment of our
hearts, and we call him a worthless fellow.
It is related of Talleyrand that when a person was excusing some petty offense
with the common apology, “One must live, you know,” he replied with his inim-
itable irony, “I confess I do not see the necessity.” The caustic Frenchman's
annihilating answer to the poor scamp had wisdom as well as wit in it. Once
confess that your rule of life is to prey upon others, or even that want shall be
regarded an excuse for departure from a noble law of right, and the sooner the
world is rid of you the better. No sympathy need be wasted upon him who
makes such an admission of his failure to understand the career for which he
was created. The help that may be given him is not proffered for any present
worth in his existence, but for the hope that reason and truth will yet assert
themselves, and a return to better ways justify the charity. When vice and crime
go so far that a return seems hopeless, we put the offender out of the way in a
solitary dungeon, or in last resort the gallows rids the world of an enemy and
a nuisance.
It is often objected that such views of an ideal life as those I have been trying to
draw are mere student's dreams—vague visions, which we may amuse ourselves
with in contemplative hours, but which are not the stuff that practical life is
made of; consequently, that a practical education must be modeled upon far
different rules from any that can be drawn from such considerations.
I wish to come to close quarters with precisely such objections, and affirm
that the only truly practical life, and therefore the only truly practical educa-
tion, is that which is based upon the truest ideal; that between the two there is
not only no antagonism, but the most perfect harmony and accord. The ideal
is the law of crystalization, which, were all obstructions removed, would form
each mineral into its own peculiar and perfect geometric shape. The practical
is the result of the operation of this law in the midst of conflicting and varying
pressures, and upon materials more or less mixed and impure. The law, how-
ever abnormal or amorphic may be the forms before us, has still been operative,
and we shall only comprehend the history of the stones we tread upon when we
assume this law as the constant force striving to develop itself throughout the
whole formative period of the mineral's existence. So there is in each tree a law
of growth in accordance with which each cell has been formed and deposited in
its place. What interferences may have occurred from wind and storm, what
deficient growth from lack of light or nourishment, what worms may have
gnawed at the heart, what limbs may have been pruned away, we may not know.
All these things have perhaps operated together to prevent the realization of the
ideal tree, perfect in structure, in vigor, and in beauty. But it will not do to
deny the existence of the law itself, or to refuse to recognize the truth that
without it there could be no tree at all—only a dead mass of matter without
organization, vitality, or growth.
The analogy applies with great force to the development of the human mind
in each of the three directions of its growth. The true law is the realization of
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the ideal; the practical question is how to approximate this most closely in the
midst of the actual circumstances of life. More than this, the impulse to obey
the law, the perception at once of its beauty and its obligatoriness, is found in
fact, as I have already said, in every human breast. It may never have been
analyzed or distinctly stated in the form of a philosophical proposition; it may
not even be clearly apprehended and be only a vague groping after something
higher and better; it may seem to operate only casually and at intervals; but
there it is, the natural revelation of his destiny to man, creating discontent with
his present condition, making him rejoice when he has stumbled forward a sin-
gle step and gotten a new view of beauty or of truth, forcing him to condemn
himself when he has departed from the highest sense of duty yet known to him,
and, though he have no better revelation, and be a mere heathen, leaving him,
as St. Paul has said, “without excuse.”
It is curious to observe the manifestations of this law in the commonest ex-
periences of life. We need not refer to the recognition of the laws of common
morality, without which society would be impossible; but may take examples in
another department of culture where the advocates of mere utility would be
puzzled to find any advantage, in their sense of the term, in the tribute which
all men pay to the beautiful. It may seem absurd to say that the same desire
to realize the ideal which would make a Raphael paint his Madonnas, makes an
ignorant and untutored teamster love to adorn his mules' heads with gay tas-
sels, and yet it is substantially true. There is no sphere in life so humble, no
labor so continuous or wearying, no occupation so purely industrial, that men
and women in it will not gladly add to its toil for the gratification of paying
some tribute to beauty in its performance. The very implements of labor are
adorned, and from the rude painting of the beam of a plow to the fancy brass
mountings of a locomotive engine, everywhere some place is found for human
nature to add something for the sake of taste, where the general design seemed
wholly devoted to the most rigid idea of use. Beauty will not consent to be
thrust into the narrow corner of men's leisure hours, where Spencer's philosophy
would put her, but insists that everywhere along our most wearisome paths we
should place little shrines where we may cast some votive-offering in passing.
The sailor delights in the carved and gilt billet head of his ship, or glances with
pleasure at a gilded ball placed above his main truck where the very hight from
which it gleams down upon him, like a star awakens thoughts that mount up-
ward in his own soul. He loves to see the bright-colored pennants flying, and to
dress his vessel with them, as he would see his sweetheart bedecked with ribbons.
The most practical, matter-of-fact merchant gladly adds large sums to the cost
of his warehouse or shop for the sake of fine architecture and sculptured orna-
ment, and whether he does it to gratify his own taste or to attract that of his
customer, it is equally a proof of the persistence with which beauty-worship ob.
trudes itself into and insists upon elevating and ennobling that which seems
most foreign to it. The fact that, amongst uncivilized or uncultivated men,
taste often takes on grotesque or bizarre forms, as in the savage's tattooing of
his body, does not prove that beauty is to be despised, nor that the tendency
even in the savage is not an elevating one. Rude and elementary as it may
be in form, it is, nevertheless, the germ out of which all culture in art must
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grow. The pleasure in mere contrast of bright colors, and the perception of
the grace of curved lines, will, in time, and with the general expansion of the
mind, become an appreciation and love of true art, as certainly as the canoe
will grow into the steamship, and barbarous superstitions into lofty systems of
philosophy.
If we try to define exactly the difference between the mental manifestations
in man and in brutes, we shall perhaps find ourselves unable to do better than
to say that man possesses the power of reflecting upon his own thoughts, while
brutes do not. Man is thus enabled to treat his thoughts as things, to com-
pare them, to observe their relations, to imagine changes in them, and to de-
velop them—in short, to reason. But to what end and for what purpose does
he reason 7 Manifestly that he may elevate his conceptions toward the divine,
and, forming for himself a true ideal of the perfectibility of his own nature,
strive earnestly and unceasingly to attain it. The distinction between him
and the brute is precisely such as enables him to form this ideal in each depart-
ment of his nature, and is what constitutes him man and not mere animal.
When we look at Mr. Spencer's classification of human activities, we shall
find that those which he places first in order of importance are those which
man shares with the brute, and it is only when we come to the last and least
of the whole five classes that we find anything which can be called distinctively
human. The lower animals, like man, have activities that tend to self-preser-
vation, that secure the necessaries of life, that rear offspring, and even that
tend, in some sense, to create and preserve a social community. This, in itself,
would seem to be enough to condemn the classification as vicious. The dig-
nity and importance of a human career must be found in that which makes it
human, and it is almost a reductio ad absurdum to argue that that is most im-
portant to man which he possesses in common with the lower orders of beings,
or that the education is most important to him which will teach him to do what
the brutes do without any education whatever.
The same general arguments may properly be used in regard to different
classes of men. It is by no means proven that the most civilized and enlight-
ened nations are better off in the essentials of a mere physical existence or
the propagation of their species than the uncivilized tribes of Africa. So far
as mere animal existence is concerned, it may well be questioned whether the
savage does not enjoy the best of it, if he live in a country where either the
abundance of game or the natural products of the earth afford a sufficient sub-
sistence without great labor. I verily believe that the experience of our young
men in this generation will bear me out in the assertion that the nomadic life
and coarse fare of the camp give a keener relish and livelier enjoyment to the
mere sensation of physical existence than they had ever found in any other
way. Such is certainly the conclusion I have reached from both experience
and observation, and if forced to find the value of civilization and education
chiefly in the increased advantages for the support of man's animal life, I
should unhesitatingly conclude that civilization had proven an utter failure.
If, on the other hand, we compare civilized and uncivilized races by the
standard which I have contended for, and estimate their advance by their ap-
proximation to the ideal in virtue, in art, and in intellectual power, we shall
9
see at once that we have found the true criterion of progress, and that our rea-
son approves the estimate which puts a far higher value upon this sort of growth
than upon any thing which pertains to our physical nature alone.
It would not be necessary even to allude to so trite a subject as the value of
civilization and enlightenment, were it not for the ingenious way in which Mr.
Spencer and those who follow him, attempt to build an argument in favor of a
particular scheme of study upon what I have tried to show is a false statement
of the relative worth of different activities and of the education which tends to
fit us for them. The natural sciences, they say, have developed the physical
resources of the world, and are concerned in the production of all we eat and
wear; but the procuring of food and raiment is the most important human
work: therefore, the natural sciences are the most important elements in human
intellectual education. Such, when reduced to syllogistic form, is the argument
upon which they rely. When they display the triumphs of chemistry, and dazzle
us with the truly brilliant array of glorious discoveries its devotees have made,
they use the fallacious assumption that it is to their value in the common arts
of life that we owe the discoveries, whereas no truth of history can be plainer
than that the thirst for knowledge for its own sake, and as enlarging man's
mental domain, has stimulated men to the studies which have often unexpect-
edly resulted in physical and material benefits to the race. When they laud the
value of mathematical study, they ignore the fact that the earlier mathemati-
cians were unmercifully derided by the practical men of their day as the ab-
surdest of visionary theorists, who were wasting upon circles and triangles the
energies which should have been devoted to the plow or to the sword. We may
run the whole round of the sciences, and shall find that had the principle pre-
vailed that knowledge was only of value in proportion as it directly taught how
to supply the necessaries of life, no progress could possibly have been made in
any one of them; for no man could possibly foretell any advantage in this re-
spect which could come from scientific study, till the discovery were actually
made; and when made, it has often proved the furthest possible removed from
that for which the discoverer was looking,
Another fallacy often used by the class of writers under consideration, is that
of assuming that a scientific knowledge of whatever enters into one's work in
life, is of great use in the practical performance of that work. In many cases
this is as absurdly and evidently untrue as to affirm that a scientific knowledge
of the causes of the tides and of the local increase of the tidal wave would be
of great use to the inhabitants of the shores of the Bay of Fundy in preserving
their children and their cattle from drowning. The theory of those tides is a
most curious and interesting thing, and, as science, would be attractive and
valuable to whoever might study them; but the only thing of practical value to
the fisherman or his family, is to know that the tide flows at certain intervals,
with a certain rapidity and to a certain hight. The fact is, that scientific the-
ory and physical practice are, in a vast majority of instances, widely divorced,
and if we could not defend scientific or literary education by better arguments
than those drawn from their utility in practical bread-getting, they would quickly
go to the wall. Such arguments may sometimes prevail with ignorant people,
whom we would persuade into giving their children a better education than they
s
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have themselves; but to use them is a species of mental dishonesty, and it may
well be doubted whether anybody who has intelligence enough to be influenced
by such considerations, may not be more powerfully affected by the truth that
education ennobles the man.
So far as practical results from scientific investigation is concerned, it is, and
of necessity must be, very rarely the case that a mind which is occupied upon
the mere mechanical repetition of the details of a trade, or manual occupation,
can have the leisure for pushing scientific researches far enough to improve the
processes of his business in any respect in which they depend upon profound
science. This is impliedly admitted by Mr. Spencer, when he says that chemi-
cal processes enter so largely into so common a trade as that of brewing, that
the brewer of large business finds his account in keeping a chemist on his prem-
ises. The chemical knowledge which makes this professional chemist valuable
to the wholesale brewer, is the accumulation of a life-time of study, devoted to
a particular science, and it is simply laughable to argue that such a preparation
in chemistry should be part of the education of a brewer's apprentice.
Even in the existing condition of civilization, a comparatively small body of
thoroughly educated scientific men do all that is done in the application of sci-
ence to the arts and common business of life, because the advance of knowl-
edge has already been such that only the few who combine special adaptation
to the pursuit, with many years' devotion to it, can hope to advance any depart-
ment of pure science, Indeed, a small subdivision of a science is as much as
one man may hope to master in detail, and the whole argument that the me-
chanical practitioners of a business or trade need a scientific knowledge of all
the processes involved in it, or would find practical advantage in their work
from such smattering of science as their leisure or their youthful education
would give them, falls to the ground. -
It must be noticed that this does not in the least interfere with the belief i
the material advantages which the world derives from science, nor with the opin-
ion that it is extremely desirable that competent scientific men should push
their investigations in all directions in which further valuable discoveries are
likely to be found. I am only combatting the theory that the assistance which
any department of knowledge gives in procuring the necessaries of life is the
criterion by which we should judge of the worth of that knowledge for purposes
of general education.
Astronomy is a science which, by Mr. Spencer's standard, should be next to use-
less, for the movements of the principal heavenly bodies need only to be accurately
observed and noted to make navigation reasonably secure, and all the nicer in-
vestigations, reaching out into extra planetary space, are wasted, unless knowl-
edge is valuable for some other reason than its material profit. Yet the world
will be slow to place the labors of Newton or Kepler below those of the brewer's
chemist. Do we assign Shakspeare and Milton to their proper place when we
put them in the last and lowest of Mr. Spencer's five classes, as the mere
amusers of our leisure hours? Are Socrates and Plato, Des Cartes and Locke,
Rant and Hamilton, all idlers, whose thoughts, since they can hardly be called
amusing, and certainly do not assist the world to food or clothing, are not to
have any appreciable value assigned them 7 Was Mr. Spencer engaged in the
W
11
least important of all human activities when pondering his psychology and
biology 7 * *
But enough. It is certainly evident that it is no criterion of the worth of
human knowledge which places its value in the aid it gives in bread-getting,
and that any theory which makes physical subsistence the most important end of
human effort tends, if consistently and logically carried out, to destroy all civi-
lization, and reduce man to the condition of the brute. It will not do to say
that Mr. Spencer finds a practical use for every science, applying even biology
and psychology to the rearing of children and the conduct of the state. If
children are educated only that they may earn a living, and if society and the
state are only subordinate means of protecting us in the struggle for the same
primary and most important object, all unnecessary education and unnecessary
complications of social organization are a waste of effort, and we return to the
conclusion that the thoughtless and careless savage who eats his buffalo or his
bread fruit is the truest philosopher.
When we assume, however, that the theory we have been criticizing is a false .
one, and even that we have found the truth when we assert that the real crite-
rion of the value of knowledge is its tendency to elevate our nature toward the
ideal, our difficulties do not all immediately vanish. It is objected that the mere
support of life does in fact absorb by far the greater share of the time and at-
tention of civilized men, and that what is thus admitted to occupy so much time
and thought from the very necessity of our circumstances, may fairly be held to
have an equal relative importance. -
To this there are two answers. First, that quantity is not quality, and that,
however inscrutable the Creator's purpose may have been in decreeing that in
the sweat of our faces we should eat our bread, the smaller part of our lives
which we may devote to our highest culture may in real value far outweigh the
larger, which we must give to physical toil. It may be that in the divine econ-
omy, as in the human, the worth of a thing is estimated by the cost of produc-
tion, and that the necessity of economizing the moments which are available
for the highest uses, may be intended to make us set a still higher value than
we should otherwise do, upon the products we may get from them. This neces-
sity for industry, if we would accomplish anything, is taught in so many ways
that we may well assume that work is meant to be a discipline, and that we are,
therefore, not allowed to reach those things we most covet, except we submit
cheerfully to the condition, and be “diligent in business.” One-third of our
time is lost in sleep, an absolute loss which demonstrates that the necessary ex-
penditure of time is no gauge of the importance of the thing in which it is
spent; for we are not speaking of it as a means to another end, but as an end
in itself. Sleep is good, as a means of restoring “tired nature,” but in itself,
it is like death, of which it is the prototype, a deprivation and absence of all
good. That the valuably productive hours are so few, seems to me, therefore,
to be so far from proving that they are least important, that the fact may the
rather be held to make for the opposite conclusion, and to argue their precious-
IlêSS, -
But there is another answer to the objection, and that is, that a noble pur-
pose gives new character to all the means used to accomplish it. The inventor
12
of a new machine may have shown marvelous powers of comprehension and
mental construction in devising it, whilst in making it of wood and metal he
may be only performing the merest mechanical drudgery; yet in this mechani-
cal labor he is invested with all the dignity which belongs to genius, because
the work on which he is engaged is the realization of a great mental concep-
tion, and he feels that the blows he strikes are not the mere exchange of so much
manual dexterity and skill in the use of tools for so much bread, but rise to the
grade of his intellectual life and are dignified by becoming part of the process
by which his thought is transformed into its material embodiment; and this is
true not only of the physical work directly connected with the realization of
thought, but of that which indirectly tends to the same end. Though the in-
ventor I have supposed should be forced to work upon his invention at intervals
only, and to spend most of his time in working for hire to earn a livelihood, or
the means to buy the material to complete his plans; still the glory which be.
longs to a great purpose will gild the whole life, and the thoughts of the object
of his ambition and his hopes will crowd into the minutest intervals of his toil,
forbidding that it should ever become a dwarfing or degrading thing. To what-
ever sphere of life or kind of occupation we apply these considerations, the
result is the same; and life, as a whole, will be noble or mean, attractive or re-
pulsive, as the ruling purpose which controls it is worthy or unworthy. All that
can be demanded of us, all that we can demand of ourselves is, that, having
once fixed our eye upon the true ideal, we honestly and diligently use all the
opportunities and means within our reach to assist us in approximating it.
I shall notice but one other fallacy in the Spencerian theory, and that is the
assertion that “it would be utterly contrary to the beautiful economy of nature, if
one kind of culture were needed for the gaining of information, and another
kind were needed as a mental gymnastic.” “The red Indian,” we are told,
“acquires the swiftness and agility which make him a successful hunter, by the
actual pursuit of animals,” and the conclusion is drawn that “we may be cer-
tain, a prior, that the same law holds throughout education.” The application
made of this inference is, that since education in the physical sciences is the
only practical education, such science is the only fit means of intellectual dis-
cipline. As I have already attempted to show that high scientific culture can
be called practical only by a license which would also include every depart-
ment of literature and metaphysical philosophy, I might content myself with
saying that as the premise fails we need not trouble ourselves about the conclu-
sion. The point, however, warrants a little fuller examination.
If we were attempting to train a child upon the most rigid utilitarianism
which could be conceived, we should still find it impossible to predict what our
pupil would be fit for when grown, and, therefore, should be equally at a loss to
decide upon the line of special instruction needed. No one will seriously con-
tend now-a-days that human nature is so completely plastic that we may deter-
mine a buman being's career from the cradle, and feed him with the pabulum,
both mental and physical, which will be peculiarly fitted for that career alone.
Wagaries of this sort may safely be left to whimsical enthusiasts who will not
have following enough to make it necessary to refute them; or, if answered at
all, the best reply will be that given some years ago by one of the illustrated
13
newspapers, in a humorous wood-cut, wherein the patent developing proeess was
caricatured by a picture of a laboratory, in which, under bell glasses and with
elaborate machinery for supplying the needed elements, a spectacled wiseacre
was “forcing” infants, developing in one, brain; in another, arms; and in
another, legs, according as a philosopher, a smith, or a dancer were wanted;
the unnecessary parts being reduced to a minimum, which made the contrast
ludicrously grotesque.
The truth is, that even when the social circumstances of a youth are such as
to leave the choice of a business or career open to him, it is not usually until he
approaches maturity that there is evident any such tendency or bias of mind
as will be a safe guide in deciding for what he is best fitted. Nothing is more
common than to see a student go plodding on with a course of study for years,
puzzling his friends and teachers as to his mental character, until finally some
accidental circumstance, some taste of a new kind of learning will awaken his
powers, and he will spring forward with a bound, easily distancing competition
in his new chosen career. For this reason it is necessary that early education
should have variety in it, and the mental response the student makes to various
kinds of stimulus applied should be carefully watched. For the same reason it
is impossible to seek discipline only in the preappointed line of a permanent
career, for no such line can be determined at the beginning, and the mental
gymnastic must be such as to give the best average results, trusting to the pow-
ers so developed to find or make a way for themselves subsequently.
If we assume the truth of the doctrine that discipline is to be got only in
doing or studying the thing in which man's daily work consists, the red Indian
would never get beyond his hunting; for no series of hunts would teach even
agriculture or any mode of passing into a material civilization, to say nothing
of any purely intellectual progress. Whatever be the scale of advancement
from which we start, it is safe to say that no practice of the daily routine for
the sake of mere proficiency in it, ever lifts a man to a higher grade. It is only
when his soul has beome enamored of perfection, when he fixes his purpose to
get beyond all past achievement, and acquires the love of knowledge for its own
sake, that any real advance is made. The spirit which animates all true pro-
gress is admirably expressed by Lessing in a passage quoted by Sir Wm. Ham-
ilton. “Did the Almighty,” says he, “holding in his right hand truth, and in
his left, search after truth, deign to proffer me the one I might prefer, in all
humility, but without hesitation, I should request search after truth.”
If Hugh Miller had been content to study only how to become a better quarry-
man or stonemason, he might have remained to the end of his days in the Cro-
marty quarries, as blind to the divine words written in the stone-book of the old
red sandstone, as the other generations of poor Scotch laborers who had pre-
ceded him. They, as well as he, had seen the fossils tumble from their prim-
eval bed, as with pick and crowbar they heaved the strata from their place to
make of them a village tombstone or a cottage hearth. But he had somehow
become smitten with the zeal to know, had chosen the “search after truth,”
whilst they were content to make little improvements and economies in the
working of the stone and the routine of their humble trade. They were practi-
cal men, and were content to call the fossil belemnite, a “thunderbolt,” as their
14
fathers had done before them, whilst he was determined to comprehend the tes-
timony of the rocks, and the asterolepis seemed to be calling to him from the
heart of Moray cliff to come and discover it, and describe it with a poetic beauty
and justness of description which should charm the learned world. To his
brother quarrymen, Hugh Miller was as very an impracticable as a Porson or a
Bentley would seem to be to Mr. Spencer.
It will not do to say that Miller's geology was practical study, because it was
connected in time and place with the mechanical work of quarrying; for such
latitude would allow us to assert that psychology is a practical study for all men,
because they are constantly dealing with each other, and the languages are
practical because all men use their tongues. There would be nothing left of
Mr. Spencer's theory with such an interpretation.
We may go further, however, and say that in the actual manner in which the
necessities of our existence or casual circumstances determine the business by
which men get their bread, that culture which gives its only real value and dig-
nity to life must often be very far removed from the daily work. In some few
learned professions or artistic employments men may make their progress in the
higher development go step by step with their ordinary employment; but such
cases are the very small minority, and it may be doubted whether in the fresh-
ness which variety gives, and in the pleasures of contrasted occupations, there
may not be a compensation for the loss of time. But be this as it may, the
stubborn fact remains that most men must seek their highest culture in paths
far separated from those which their neighbors see them commonly treading.
Socrates was a statuary by trade, and though he showed in many ways that
he had high conceptions of the beautiful as well as the good, we do not learn
that he ever rivaled Phidias, and he might have spent his time to his dying day
cutting out rude Hermes for Athenian door-ways, or copying the conventional
forms of mythologic decoration, without leaving the world a whit the richer for
his existence. It was only when, amid the derision of the sophists and profes-
sional teachers of his time, he began to use his terrible dialectic upon the men-
tal and moral shams around him, that he became the world's benefactor, and
laid the foundation of a fame durable as the ages. The training which evolved
the Socratic method was not given by his masters in sculpture, and was not to
be found in any rules for handling mallet and chisel. &
In a humble tenement at Amsterdam, an excommunicated Jew made his liv-
ing by grinding spectacle glasses and other optical lenses. His neighbors knew
him as a patient, charitable, inoffensive, and laborious man, earning a bare sub-
sistence by a mechanical trade. His mind did not seek its discipline by perfect-
ing the mechanism of his business, nor even in what would have seemed a cog-
nate employment, the study of optics. The world has heard nothing of his im-
provements or discoveries in natural science; but when his pure and patient
life ended, and the “Ethica” was published, it was soon seen that spectacle-
making was the mere husk of Spinoza's existence; that his career was not to
be found in the labor which had given him food, but in those wonderfully pro-
found and subtle thoughts, which he had builded up into a system, between the
turns of his wheel, and piled into a geometric pyramid of philosophy, which
15
was to mark an epoch in the world's intellectual history as imperishably as the
pyramid of Cheops immortalizes a historic dynasty.
Charles Lamb was known, to those who had business to do in the old East
India House, as one of some score of patient clerks, bending over their great
ledgers and posting to debit and credit the cargoes of silks, spices, and drugs,
which the wall-sided old trading ships had brought round the Cape of Good
Hope. Year after year he polished the same desk with his sleeves, and had the
world looked to him to find his discipline and his career in improving book-
keeping by double entry, or even in compiling statistics of trade and commerce,
it would have been sorely disappointed. He did not accept Mr. Spencer's the-
ory of the practical in study. He looked upon the mechanical routine as a
quiet means of getting his bread and a rare book now and then; but his life
and his life's work was as far removed from India House as Calcutta or Bom-
bay. He was really a foreigner and stranger among his fellow clerks, however
genial may have been his passing intercourse with them. His friends were
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hazlitt and Southey, and his life reached back to
Ben Johnson and the wits and poets of Queen Bess' time. He says of himself:
“How cool I sit in this office, with no possible interruption further than what I
may term material. There is not as much metaphysics in thirty-six of the peo-
ple here as there is in the first page of Locke's Treatise on the Human Under-
standing, or as much poetry as in any ten lines of the ‘Pleasures of Hope.’”
Rogers was a banker, and a successful one; but the world sets more store
by his sweet verses, which have made him known as “Rogers the poet,” than by
all the money he accumulated in his bank vaults. The work which was to
endure, was in this case, also, as far as possible removed from the ephemeral
employment which made his daily business.
Stuart Mill has spent his life, like Lamb, in the monotony of the India Com-
pany's counting-house; but this has been only the accident of an existence of
which the substance has been a philosophic self-culture that has carried him
through nearly the whole round of human thought, and made him a world's
teacher instead of a government clerk.
Anthony Trollope is said to be an officer in the British post-office; but we all
rejoice that his thoughts have escaped from mail-bags and postal routine, and
given us the “Chronicles of Barset.”
We see the same thing on every hand among our friends who have achieved
no fame. The thing in which their culture has been most valuable to themselves
is, quite as often as otherwise, entirely removed in character and tendencies
from the occupation on which their material support depends Necessity, op-
portunity, accident, the will of parents, or a thousand various circumstances may
determine how a man shall gain his livelihood, but his cultivation and develop-
ment will never reach the highest attainable point, unless his own capacity,
taste, and aptitude point out the path by which he shall make his attempt to ap-
proach the ideal. It is often true, besides, that a business capacity which assures
pecuniary success in one line of life is united with intellectual tastes and ten-
dencies fitted for high culture in quite another direction. The two things can
not always be made to agree, though we may regard those lives as happy OI) eS
in which they are found in harmony.
16
But I am already running beyond the limits I had assigned myself, and must
hasten to a summary and conclusion of the subject,
In response to the question, “What knowledge is of most worth 7” we have
found that the true end of human existence in this life is the approximation in
character, in intellect, and in taste, as nearly as possible, to the divine ideal.
That knowledge is of most worth, therefore, which most directly and strongly
tends to expand and elevate all the faculties and powers of our nature.
We have found, also, that the material and mental parts of us have sepa-
rate needs, and make different demands which can not always be harmonized,
and that out of this condition of things often, if not usually, arises the necessity
of separating between the education which pertains to procuring physical sub-
sistence and bodily comfort, and that which belongs to the accomplishment of
our higher destiny.
From this point it is easy to perceive what must be the practical principles
and rules which should underlie a system of education.
First—In the earlier stages of instruction the two paths coincide, because a
certain amount of the knowledge of the world and of ourselves is absolutely
necessary in traveling either of them. In the primary course both information
and discipline are aimed at ; but since information is being constantly acquired
by the natural exercise of our faculties in our situation, discipline must have
the prečminence in what we may call the artificial education of man.
Second—In the second stage of the work, while discipline is continued, an
enlarged scope of study must be opened, and enough learned of the various
fields, both of science and literature, to expand our views of our own nature
as well as of the universe, and at the same time afford the opportunity for de-
veloping the peculiar abilities and powers of the student, and enabling him to
choose a congenial career in life, as well as to determine the direction in which
his more continuous and higher cultivation should be pushed. If the ordinary
business of life, and the special tastes and capacities of the youth for learning,
may be made to coincide, so much the better; but if not, there is no occasion
for discouragement, since we have seen how diverse careers and duties may be
harmoniously blended in the experience of a single life.
Third—The last stage of the journey must be performed without the aid of
schools and professors; but it does not, on that account, cease to be a part,
and the most important part, of education. The cares of the family, the sup-
port and education of children, and the duties of good neighborhood and citi-
zenship, will develop the business and social nature, while all the preceding
discipline and acquired information should be only a foundation on which the
superstructure of a symmetric intellectual and moral life are to be built. In
this portion of life, which should be the most fertile in every good work, educa-
tional development is most commonly neglected. Most persons who have re-
ceived even a moderate training in youth, preserve a vague purpose of continuing
their mental culture; but it is too often a desultory and aimless general read-
ing, without system or disciplinary power. I can not help believing that if the
conception of education as the means of realizing the “complete" or ideal
life were more thoroughly received and generally inculcated, it would do much
to bring about the needed reform. -
17
In one department only of our nature is this idea insisted upon as it should
be. The ministers of religion understand the importance of a controlling pur-
pose giving character and object to all hnman concerns, and they do not fail
to keep before our eyes the ideal spiritual life toward which, with humble but
steadfast faith, all should strive. We need a similar teaching in regard to our
intellectual and aesthetic nature. The ideal must become not only a criterion
of the worth of knowledge, but it should be a law, fully recognized as obliga-
tory, that we are to be as constant and unfaltering in our efforts at progress
toward it, as in our struggle for religious purity. If those intrusted with the
education of our youth shall give due prominence to this thought, and seek to
make it become a part of the mental nature of their pupils, it can not fail that
a much larger number than heretofore will be fired by a noble zeal to make
their life the continuous discipline and culture it ought to be, and to have the
intellectual work of their mature years surpass that of their youth, as the
master workman's performance surpasses that of the apprentice.
It is easy to see that the general view of the worth and objects of education
which I have presented, is inconsistent with any narrow notion of the practical.
All knowledge is of worth to him who would seek to know also its place in the
infinite science which embraces all things. We can not afford to exclude litera-
ture, either ancient or modern, unless the study of man in the historic develop-
ment of his character and ideas is of inferior importance to man. We can
not exclude philosophy, for the human soul responds now as it did in ancient
days to the mysterious power of the Delphic oracle: “Know thyself.” We can
not exclude history, for the more wisely and lovingly it is studied, the more truly
does it appear to be what it has been so well called, “philosophy teaching by ex-
ample.” Neither can we afford to exclude the physical sciences or be driven into
opposition to their study by their unwise advocates of the Spencer school, be-
cause they open to us the unnumbered marvels of the material universe, and
powerfully train our faculties of observation and experimental reasoning.
With a generous stimulus applied to the love of learning and the “search
after truth,” we need have no fears that any of the utilities in practical life,
which science can furnish or discover will be overlooked. A true catholicity
in education will leave each student free to devote his life to whatever he finds
himself best fitted to master, and the numbers devoted to different departments,
under the influence of their mental tastes, will be found, like the law which
governs the sex of those born into the world, to provide mysteriously, but
surely, for all the true necessities of human progress.
So much of the work it is ours to do. All will not be fashioned to the same
mold, when our educational systems have done their best. All may not be
formed of the same clay, or originally intended for the same uses. But in this
regard it is not for the clay to complain of the potter. To do our work, hon-
estly and steadfastly, to learn the happiness of the most untiring industry when
it is directed to a great end; to dignify the common uses of life by making them
part of a more beautiful and complete whole; to become the most and best
that such faculties as ours are capable of -all this is possible for us and is
the student's most solemn duty. As to the rest, resuming the figure of the pot-
ter's wheel, we may say with Robert Browning:
18
“But I need, now as then,
Thee, God, who moldest men,
And since, not even when the whirl was worst,
Did I – to the wheel of life
With shapes and colors rife,
Bound dizzily — mistake my end to slake thy thirst;
- So, take and use thy work,
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim
My times be in thy hand, '...
Perfect the cup as planned,
Let age approve, of youth, and death complete the same !”
ERRATA.—Page 4, line 3, for “idea.” read ideal; page 5, line 21 from bottom, for
“in” read and; page 6, line 5, for “and” read when. -