There is no revolution in the contrary, or outflowing design. Like all else in the world of thought it is, in the germ at least, as old as the Greeks and its illustrious pioneer was Socrates (469-399 B. C.), who led the approach to truth not by laying down the law himself but by means of answers required of his students. The efferent outflowing principle, moreover, is in the program of the British mathematician, Perry and many other reformers to-day.
Against the centripetal theory of acquiring culture Huxley revolted with all his might. His daily training in the centrifugal school was in the genesis of opinion; and he incessantly practiced the precept that forming one's own opinion is infinitely better than borrowing one. Our sophisticated age discourages originality of view because of the plenitude of a ready-made supply of editorials, of reviews, of reviews of reviews, of critiques, comments, translations and cribs. Study political speeches, not editorials about them; read original debates, speeches, and reports. If you purpose to be a naturalist get as soon as you can at the objects themselves; if you would be an artist, go to your models; if a writer, on the same principle take your authors at first hand, and, after you have wrestled with the texts, and reached the full length of your own fathom line, then take the fathom line of the critic and reviewer. Do not trust to mental peptones. Carry the independent, inquisitive, skeptical and even rebellious spirit of the graduate school well down into undergraduate life, and even into school life. If you are a student force yourself to think independently; if a teacher compel your youth to express their own minds. In listening to a lecture weigh the evidence as presented, cultivate a polite skepticism, not affected but genuine, keep a running fire of interrogation marks in your mind, and you will finally develop a mind of your own. Do not climb that mountain of learning in the hope that when you reach the summit you will be able to think for yourself; think for yourself while you are climbing.
In studying the lives of your great men you will find certain of them were veritable storehouses of facts, but Darwin, the greatest of them all in the last century, depended largely upon his inveterate and voluminous powers of note-taking. Thus you may pray for the daily bread of real mental growth, for the future paradise is a state of mind and not a state of memory. The line of thought is the line of greatest resistance; the line of memory is the line of least resistance; in itself it is purely imitative, like the gold or silver electroplating process which lends a superficial coating of brilliancy or polish to what may be a shallow mind.
The case is deliberately overstated to give it emphasis.
True, the accumulated knowledge of what has been thought and said, serves as the gravity law which will keep you from flying off at a tangent. But no warning signals are needed, there is not the least danger that constructive thinking will drive you away from learning; it will much more surely drive you to it, with a deeply intensified reverence for your intellectual forebears; in fact, the eldest offspring of centrifugal education is that keen and fresh appetite for knowledge which springs only from trying to add your own mite to it. How your Maxwell, Herz, Röntgen, Curie, with their world-invigorating discoveries among the laws of radiant matter, begin to soar in your estimation when you yourself wrest one single new fact from the reluctant world of atoms! How your modern poets, Maeterlinck and Rostand, take on the air of inspiration when you would add a line of prose verse to what they are delving for in this mysterious human faculty of ours. Regard Voltaire at the age of ten in 'Louis-le-Grand,' the Eton of France, already producing bad verses, but with a passionate voracity for poetry and the drama. Regard the youthful Huxley returning from his voyage of the 'Rattlesnake' and laying out for himself a ten years' course in search of pure information.
This route of your own to opinions, ideas, and the discovery of new facts or principles brings you back again to Huxley as the man who always had something of his own to say and labored to say it in such a way as to force people to listen to him. His wondrous style did not come easily to him; he himself told me it cost him years of effort, and I consider his advice about style far wiser than that of Herbert Spencer. Why forego pleasures, turn your back on the world, the flesh, and the devil, and devote your life to erudition, observation, and the pen if you remain unimpressive, if you cannot get an audience, if no one cares to read what you write? This moral is one of the first that Huxley has impressed upon you, namely, write to be read; if necessary "stoop to conquer," employ all your arts and wiles to get an audience in science, in literature, in the arts, in politics. Get an audience you must, otherwise you will be a cipher and not a force.
Pursuant of the constructive design, the measure of the teacher's success is the degree in which ideas come not from him but from his pupils. A brilliant address may produce a temporary emotion of admiration, a dry lecture may produce a permanent productive impulse in the hearers. One may compare some who are popularly known as gifted teachers to expert swimmers who sit on the bank and talk inspiringly on analyses of strokes; the centrifugal teacher takes the pupils into the water with him, he may even pretend to drown and call for a rescue. In football parlance the coach must get into the scrimmage with the team. This was the lesson taught me by the great embryologist Francis Balfour of Cambridge, who was singularly noted for doing joint papers with his men. An experiment I have tried with marked success in order to cultivate centrifugal power and expression at the same time is to get out of the lecture chair and make my students in turn lecture to me. This is virtually the famous method of teaching law re-discovered by the educational genius of Langdell; the students do all the lecturing and discoursing, the professor lolls quietly in his chair and makes his comments; the stimulus upon ambition and competition is fairly magical; there is in the classroom the real intellectual struggle for existence which one meets in the world of affairs. I would apply this very Socratic principle in every branch of instruction, early and late, and thus obey the 'acceleration' law in education which I have spoken of above as bringing into earlier and earlier stages those powers which are to be actually of service in after life.
There is then no mystery about education if we plan it along the actual lines of self-development followed by these great leaders and shape its deep under-current principles after our own needs and experience. Look early at the desired goal and work toward it from the very beginning. The proof that the secret does not lie in subject, or language, but in preparation for the living productive principle is found in the fact that there have been relatively educated men in every stage of history. The wall painters in the Magdalenian caves were the producers and hence the educated men of their day. This goal of production was sought even earlier by the leaders of Eolithic men 200,000 years ago and is equally magnetic for the men of dirigible balloons and aeroplanes of our day. It is, to follow in mind-culture the principle of addition and accretion characteristic of all living things, namely, to develop the highest degree of productive power, centrifugal force, original, creative, individual efficiency. Through this the world advances; the Neolithic man with his invention of polished implements succeeds the Palæolithic, and the man of books and printing replaces the savage.
The standards of a liberal mind are and always have been the same, namely, the sense of Truth and Beauty, both of which are again in conformity with Nature.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all