“The vocation of the scholar of our time becomes most plain. He is to take his stand and to make his protest. With a dignity and a resolution born of the greatness of his calling and his opportunity, he is to spurn that low estimate of his work and its result which measures them by what they have earned in money or can produce in dividends. Here, in his counting-room or his warehouse, sits the plutocrat who has amassed his millions, and who can forecast the fluctuations of the market with the unerring accuracy of an aneroid barometer. To such a one comes the professor from some modest seat of learning among the hills, minded to see his old classmate of other days, to grasp his hand again, and to learn, if it may be, how he fares. And the rich man looks down with a bland condescension upon the school-fellow who chose the company of his books rather than the companionship of the market-place, and as he notes, perhaps, his lean and Cassius-like outline, his seedy if not shabby garb, and his shy and rustic manner, smooths his own portly and well-clad person with complacency, and thanks his stars that he early took to trade. Poor fool! He does not perceive that his friend the professor has most accurately taken his measure, and that the clear and kindly eyes that look at him through those steel-bowed spectacles have seen with something of sadness, and something more of compassion, how the finer aspirations of earlier days have all been smothered and quenched! In an age which is impatient of any voice that will not cry, ‘Great is the god of railroads and syndicates, and greater yet are the apostles of ‘puts’ and ‘calls,’ of ‘corners’ and pools!’ we want a race of men who by their very existence shall be a standing protest against the reign of a coarse materialism and a deluge of greed and self-seeking.
“But to have such a race of men we must have among us those whose vision has been purged and unsealed to see the dignity of the scholar’s calling. One may not forget that among those who will soon go forth from college halls to begin their work in life there must needs be many to whom the nature of that work, and in some sense the aims of it, are foreordained by the conditions under which they are compelled to do it. One may not forget, in other words, that, with many of us, the stern question of earning our bread is that which most urgently challenges us, and which we cannot hope to evade. But there is no one of us who may not wisely remember that, in the domain of the intellect as in the domain of the spiritual and moral nature, ‘the life is more than meat and the body than raiment,’ and that the hope of our time, or of any time, is not in men who are concerned in what they can get, but in what they can see. Frederick Maurice has well reminded us how inadequate is that phrase which describes the function of the scholar to be the acquisition of knowledge. Here is a man whose days and nights are spent in laborious plodding, and whose brain, before he is done with life, becomes a store-house from which you can draw out a fact as you would take down a book from the shelves of a library. We must not speak of such a scholar disrespectfully; and in a generation which is impatient of plodding industry, and content, as never before, with smart and superficial learning, we may well honor those whose rare acquisitions are the fruit of painful and untiring labor. But, surely, his is a nobler understanding of his calling as a scholar who has come to see that, in whatsoever department of inquiry, it is not so much a question of how much learning he is possessed of, as, rather, how truly anything that he has learned has possessed him. There are men whose acquirements in mere bulk and extent are, it may be, neither large nor profound. But when they have taken their powers of inquiry and investigation and gone with them to the shut doors of the kingdom of knowledge, they have tarried there in stillness and on their knees, waiting and watching for the light. And to these has come, in all ages, that which is the best reward of the scholar—not a fact to be hung up on a peg and duly numbered and catalogued, but the vision of a truth to be the inspiration of all their lives.”
Among the departments of higher education at which the self-styled “practical” man turns up his nose are the mental, moral and political sciences. They are sneered at as a mass of mere theories; good enough, perhaps, to help intellectual natures otherwise unoccupied to pass away the time, but of no practical good in the world. Yet President Gilman, whose mind runs largely upon applied science, says of these studies:
“They have twofold value—their service to the individual and their service to the state. It is by the study of the history of opinion, by the scrutiny of mental phenomena, and by the discussion of ethical principles, that religious and moral character is to be developed. The hours of reflection are redeemed from barrenness and made fruitful, like sand-plains irrigated by mountain-streams, when they are pervaded by the perennial currents which flow from the lofty heights of philosophy and religion. Above all other educational subjects in importance stands philosophy, the exercise of reason upon those manifold and perplexing problems of existence which are as old as humanity and as new as the nineteenth century. For its place in a liberal education no substitute need apply. What is true of the moral sciences in reference to individual character may be said of the historical and political sciences in relation to the state. That nation is in danger of losing its liberties, and of entering upon a period of corruption and decay, which does not keep its eye steadily fixed on the experience of other nations, and does not apply to its own institutions and laws the lessons of the past. The evils we complain of, the burdens we carry, the dangers we fear, are to be met by the accumulated experience of other generations and of other climes.”
Yet this distinguished teacher would not, like some men of equal note but less breadth of character, have the college student restrict himself to these departments of study. He shows himself abreast of the times when he says:
“A liberal education requires an acquaintance with scientific methods, with the modes of inquiry, of observation, of comparison, of eliminating error and of ascertaining truth, which are observed by modern investigators. Such an acquaintance may be better secured by prolonged and thorough attention to one great department of science, like chemistry, physics, biology, or geology, than by acquiring a smattering of twenty branches. If every college student would daily for one or two years devote a third of his study time to either of the great subjects we have named, or to others which might be named, he would exercise his faculties in a discipline very different from that afforded by his linguistic and mathematical work. He would not only find his observing powers sharpened; he would find his judgment improved by its exercise on the certainties of natural law. He would never afterward be prejudiced against the true workers in science, nor afraid of the progress of modern learning. Whatever might be his future vocation, ecclesiastical, educational, or editorial, he would speak of science with no covert sneer and with no suppressed apprehension. The more religious his nature, the more reverent would he become. In public affairs which call for a knowledge of science, he would know how to discriminate between the quack and the authority, and he would be quick to perceive in how many departments of government the liberal use of scientific methods is now imperatively demanded.”
If no other purpose could be attained by raising the standard and broadening the scope of such of our colleges as aspire to the rank of universities, and of sending to them all of our young men who sincerely desire a liberal education, there would be the enormous gain, to each student, of association with men of his own kind. Such association elsewhere is almost impossible in this land of scattered population and magnificent distances. Many ill-balanced “cranks” might have been spared us could active, restless, inquiring minds have been placed amid congenial surroundings instead of chafing against barren environments and consuming their minds over trivialities. Edward Everett Hale is credited with the saying: “The main good of a college is not in the things which it teaches; the good of a college is to be had from the ‘fellows’ who are there and your association with them.” President Dwight, of Yale, while dissenting from the sweeping first clause of Mr. Hale’s assertion, admits:
“But ‘the fellows’ did me much good in the way of my education. I had a most excellent and worthy set of friends, especially in the last year of my college life. My associations with them drew me out of myself, and gave me, in the best meaning of the term, the sense and the impulse of good-fellowship. As bearing upon my preparation for my life’s work, this association did much to give me that common sense, and sympathy, and warm-heartedness, and love of young men, and comprehension of their nature and their feelings, the value of which is so great to a college teacher. The college friendships, in their best development, came to me at the most fortunate period—in the later years of the course. They came at a time when they could operate most healthfully and happily upon all that I had gained from my studies and my teachers, and rounded out for me, if I may so express it, the education which belonged to the university.”
One requisite to the greater success of our higher colleges is a better class of students. When fees for matriculation and tuition formed an important part of the income from which a school had to maintain itself, an applicant’s defects of preparation or personal character were winked at; but this no longer is necessary at Yale, Harvard or any of the half dozen younger universities which have been richly endowed. No one should be received as a student who does not “mean business” and who is not quickly responsive to the influences about him. Says Prof. Shaler, of Harvard:
“It is very clear that the essential aim of our higher educational establishments is to take youths who have received a considerable training in preparatory schools, who have attained the age of about eighteen years, and have begun to acquire the motives of men, and fit them for the higher walks of active life. To the youth must be given a share of learning which may serve to enlarge to the utmost his natural powers. He must be informed and disciplined in the art and habit of acquiring information. He must also be disciplined in the ways of men, in the maintenance of his moral status by the exercise of his will, in self-confidence and in the faithful performance of duty for duty’s sake. Every influence which tends to aid him in putting away the irresponsible nature of the child should be brought to bear; every condition which will lead him to send forth his expectations and ambitions from his place in the school to his place among men should surround him.