Knowledge, however, is always to be so gathered that it shall create power and minister to efficiency. The accumulation of information is to be made with such orderliness, accuracy, thoroughness and comprehensiveness, that these qualities shall represent the chief and lasting result of knowledge. Facts may be forgotten, but the orderliness, accuracy, thoroughness and comprehensiveness in which these facts have been gathered are more important than the facts themselves, and these qualities should, and may, become a permanent intellectual treasure. These qualities are elements of efficiency. They are forces for making attainments, for securing results. The student, however, while he is securing the facts which lead to these qualities is in peril of forgetting the primary value of the qualities themselves.
On the other side, the student is also in peril of failing to distinguish between knowledge as knowledge, and knowledge which leads to personal cultivation. What is cultivation, and who is the cultivated person? Some would say that the cultivated person is the person of beautiful manners, of the best knowledge of life's best things, who is at home in any society or association. Such a definition is not to be spurned. For, is it not said that "Manners make the man"? Manners make the man! That is, Do manners create the man? that is, Do manners give reputation to the man? that is, Do manners express the character of the man? Which of the three interpretations is sound? Or does each interpretation intimate a side of the polygon?
I know of a man put in nomination for a place in an historic college. The trustees were in doubt respecting his bearing in certain social relations. As a test, I may say, he was asked to be a guest at an afternoon tea. Rather silly way, in some respects, wasn't it? I doubt if he to this day is aware of the trial to which he was subjected. The way one accepts or declines a note of invitation, the way one uses his voice, the way one enters or retires from a room may, or may not, be little in itself, but the simple act is evidence of conditions. For is not manner the comparative of man? I would not say it is the superlative.
Others would affirm that the cultivated person is the person who appreciates the best which life offers. Appreciation is intellectual, emotional, volitional. It is discrimination plus sympathy. It contains a dash of admiration. It recognizes and adopts the best in every achievement, in the arts of literature, poetry, sculpture, painting, architecture. The cultivated person seeks out the least unworthy in the unworthy, and the most worthy in that which is at all worthy. The person of cultivation knows, compares, relates, judges. He has standards and he applies them to things, measures methods. He is able to discriminate and to feel the difference between the Parthenon and the Madeleine, between a poem of Tennyson and one of Longfellow. His moral nature is fine, as his intellectual is honest. He is filled with reverence for truth, duty, righteousness. He is humble, for he knows how great is truth, how imperative, duty. He is modest, for he respects others. He is patient with others and with himself, for he knows how unattainable is the right. He can be silent when in doubt. He can speak alone when truth is unpopular. He is willing to lose his voice in the "choir invisible" when it chants either the Miserere or the Gloria in Excelsis. He is a man of proportion, of reality, sincerity, honesty, justice, temperance—intellectual and ethical.
The college man is in peril of forgetting the worth of cultivation. Knowledge should lead to cultivation, but, as in the case of securing efficiency, the mind of the student may be so fixed upon processes as to fail to recognize the importance of the result as manifest in the cultivation of his whole being.
In the case of both efficiency and cultivation, the student is to remember there is no substitute. Intellectual power cannot be counterfeited. Any attempt, also, to secure a sham cultivation is foreordained to failure.
IX
The student is also too prone to distinguish between academic morals and human morals. As a student, he may crib in examination without compunction. As a student, he too often feels it is right to deceive his teacher. Students who are gentlemen and who would as soon cut their own throats as steal your purse, will yet steal your office sign or the pole of your barber. In such college outlawry he loses no sense of self-respect, and in no degree the respect of his fellow students. Let us confess at once that in what may be called academic immorals there is usually no sense of malice. This condition does create a distinct difference between academic and human ethics. Let the distinction be given full credit. Yet, be it at once and firmly said, a lie is a lie, and thieving is thieving. The blameworthiness may differ in different cases, but there is always blameworthiness.
Be it also said the public does not usually recognize the distinction which the student himself seeks to make. The public becomes justly impatient with, and more or less indignant over, the horseplay, or immoralities which students work outside, and sometimes inside, college walls. The student is to remember that before he was a student he was a man, that after he has ceased to be a student he is to be a man, and while he is a student he is also to be a man, and also before, after, and always he is to be a gentleman. Such irregular conditions belong, of course, to youth as well as to the student. The irreverence which characterizes all American life is prone to become insolence, when, in the student, it is raised to the second or third power. The able man and true—student or not a student—of course presently adjusts himself to orderly conditions. The academic experience proves to be a discipline, though sometimes not a happy one, and the discipline helps towards the achievement of a large and rich character.