ATHENIAN CULTURE IS AMERICA'S NEED.
President Schurman Would Like to See
Here a Little More of "The Glory
That Was Greece."
Jacob Gould Schurman, president of Cornell University, has taken to heart the contrast between American culture of to-day and the culture of the ancient Greeks. In an address before an association of teachers last February, he charged that while our people "knows something of everything," its knowledge is "superficial, inaccurate, chaotic, and ill-digested." Furthermore, he says that we are indifferent to esthetic culture and suspicious of theory, of principles, and of reason.
These are serious, fundamental charges. But let us hear President Schurman's fuller statement of his case:
If the American mind is to be raised to its highest potency, a remedy must be found for these evils. The first condition of any improvement is the perception and recognition of the defects themselves.
I repeat, then, that while as a people we are wonderfully energetic, industrious, inventive, and well-informed, we are, in comparison with the ancient Athenians, little more than half developed on the side of our highest rational and artistic capabilities.
The problem is to develop these potencies in an environment which has hitherto been little favorable—and to develop them in the American people, and not merely in the isolated thinker, scholar, and artist.
If no American city is an Athens, if no American poet is a Homer or Sophocles, if no American thinker is a Plato or Aristotle, it is not merely because Americans possess only a rudimentary reason and imagination and sensibility, but because, owing to causes which are part of our national being—causes which are connected with our task of subduing a continent—the capacities with which nature has generously endowed us have not been developed and exercised to the fulness of their pitch and potency.
Our work in the nineteenth century was largely of the utilitarian order; in the twentieth century we are summoned to conquer and make our own the ideal realms of truth and beauty and excellence which far more than material victories constitute the true greatness of nations.
Pedagogic methods might be employed to stimulate American culture. President Schurman suggests that in the common schools greater emphasis be laid upon art and literature. There remains, however, as he points out, something greater than the intellectuality of the Greeks, and that is the ethical consciousness of the Hebrews.
Noble and exalted and priceless as reason and culture are, there is a still higher end of life both for individuals and nations. That end, indeed, was very inadequately conceived by the Greeks. In the creative play of reason and imagination, in their marvelous productions of speculation, science, and art, in their exaltation of mind above sense and of spirit above matter, in their conception of a harmonious development of all the rich and varied powers of man—in all these the Greeks have left to mankind a legacy as priceless as it is to-day vital and forever imperishable.
But the Greeks, even the Greek philosophers, even the "divine Plato," have not given us enough to live by. It was the Jews, the outcast, oppressed, and much-suffering Jews, who first sounded the depths of human life, discovered that the essential being of a man resides in his moral personality, and rose to the conception of a just and merciful Providence who rules in righteousness the affairs of nations and the hearts and wills of men.
If even our literary men now tell us that conduct is three-fourths of life, it is because Hebraism and the Christianity which sprang from Hebraism have stamped this idea ineffaceably upon the conscience of mankind. The selfishness and sensuality in us may revolt against the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, but the still small voice of conscience in us recognizes their authority and acknowledges that if they had might as they have right, they would absolutely govern the world. The most, the best, of greatness is goodness. The greatest man on earth is the man of pure heart and of clean hands.