The study of these structures, formations, configurations, and processes yields each its own special phase of discipline and its own measure of information. The work takes on various chemical, mechanical, and biological aspects. As a means of discipline it calls for keenness and diligence in observation, circumspection in inference, a judicial balancing of factors in interpretation. An active use of the scientific imagination is called forth in following formations to inaccessible depths or beneath areas where they are concealed from view.
While thus the study of structures, formations and configurations constitutes the most obtrusive phase of geologic study and has given trend to pedagogical opinion respecting its place in a college course, such study is not, in the opinion of the writer, the foremost function of the subject in a college curriculum that is designed to be really broad, basal, and free, in contradistinction to one that is tied to a specific vocational purpose.
This study concerned primarily with the typical college course, not with vocational courses
While we recognize, with full sympathy, that the subject matter of geology enters vitally into certain vocational and prevocational courses, and, in such relations, calls for special selections of material and an appropriate handling, if it is to fulfill these purposes effectively, this seems to us aside from the purpose of this discussion, which centers on typical college training—training which is liberal in the cosmic sense, not merely from the homocentric point of view.
Knowledge of geology contributes to a truly liberal education
To subserve these broader purposes, geology is to be studied comprehensively as the evolution of the earth and its inhabitants. The earth in itself is to be regarded as an organism and as the foster-parent of a great series of organisms that sprang into being and pursued their careers in the contact zones between its rigid body and its fluidal envelopes. These contact zones are, in a special sense, the province of geography in both its physical and its biotic aspects. The evolution of the biotic and the psychic worlds in these horizons is an essential part of the history of the whole, for each factor has reacted powerfully on the others. An appreciative grasp of these great evolutions, and of their relations to one another, is essential to a really broad view of the world of which we are a part; it is scarcely less than an essential factor in a modern liberal education.
Geology embraces all the great evolutions
Let us agree, then, at the outset, that a true study of the career of the earth is not adequately compassed by a mere tracing of its inorganic history or an elucidation of its physical structure and mineral content, but that it embraces as well all the great evolutions fostered within the earth's mantles in the course of its career.
Greatest among these fostered evolutions, from the homocentric point of view, are the living, the sentient, and the thinking kingdoms that have grown up with the later phases of the physical evolution. It does not militate against this view that each of these kingdoms is, in itself, the subject of special sciences, and that these, in turn, envelop a multitude of sub-sciences, for that is true of every comprehensive unit. Nor is it inconsistent with this larger view of the scope of geology that it is, itself, often given a much narrower definition, as already implied. In its broader sense, geology is an enveloping science, surveying, in a broad historical way, many subjects that call for intensive study under more special sciences, just as human history sweeps comprehensively over a broad field cultivated more intensively by special humanistic sciences. In a comprehensive study of the earth as an organism, it is essential that there be embraced a sufficient consideration of all the vital factors that entered into its history to give these their due place and their true value among the agencies that contributed to its evolution. A true biography of the earth can no more be regarded as complete without the biotic and psychic elements that sprang forth from it, or were fostered within its mantles, than can the biography of a human being be complete with a mere sketch of his physical frame and bodily growth. The physical and biological evolutions are well recognized as essential parts of earth history. Although the mental evolutions have emerged gradually with the biological evolutions, and have run more or less nearly parallel with them—have, indeed, been a working part of them—they have been less fully and frankly recognized as elements of geological history. They have been rather scantily treated in the literature of the subject; but they are, none the less, a vital part of the great history. They have found some recognition, though much too meager, in the more comprehensive and philosophical treatises on earth-science. It may be safely prophesied that the later and higher evolutions that grace our planet will be more adequately emphasized as the science grows into its full maturity and comes into its true place among the sciences. It is important to emphasize this here, since it is preëminently the function of a liberal college course to give precedence to the comprehensive and the essential, both in its selection of its subject matter and in its treatment of what it selects. It is the function of a liberal course of study to bring that which is broad and basal and vital into relief, and to set it over against that which is limited, special, and technical, however valuable the latter may be in vocational training and in economic application.