Keuka College - Kiondaga Yearbook (Keuka Park, NY)

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THE COLLEGE RECORD. man's greatest asset. Another asset, equally important from the point of view of progress, is the plasticity and instabili- ty oi human habits and human institutions. Technique can- not generate progress unless society is a plastic affair. And when we get tlms Ear, we feel, if we have imagination enough, that we belong to a social organism that lives on and on, and ought to live better and better, but is just as capable of living worse. It is not stability, but instability, that gives opportunity to initiative and imagination and to the effective use of knowledge and wisdom. That is, of course, all obvious enough. The different languages have their maxims on the mutability of human affairs. All parents tremble at the plasticity of their chil- dren. Yet mutability has rather pessimistic associations. That shows how we are getting away from old habits of mind. I say this is all obvious enough, yet the willingness to remember it in our serious philosophy is something new. The discovery that plasticity and instability make the only basis for that large imaginative outlook that is inspired by the idea of progress is a new discovery. The modern spirit stands in the strongest contrast to what we may call the reminiscent habit of mind. It scoffs at tra- dition often too easily and too gayly. A critic of it might say that it is just as deferential to its own authority as is any other spirit, however antiquated. But the authority of the facts is a new authority, and that makes all the differ- ence. And what are the facts, and how shall we make them serve wise ends, and what are the ends they ought to serve ? Well, we are just trying to find out. That is what gives to the modern spirit its quality of adventure and its method of experiment. In the words of one of the Harvard philoso- phers that I am always glad to quote, it is a point of view, that looks to science for its view of the facts and to the happiness o f men on earth for its ideal. How does all this bear on the business of education ? Again I can say only that we are trying to find out, to make young men and women acquainted with the modern spirit, to help them to catch its enthusiasm and to respond to the contagion of its ideals is to vitalize whatever courses of

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6 THE COLLEGE RECORD. should not find things bad and determine to make them better. There is one idea with which natural science is continual- ly occupied, the idea of casuality. The simplest illustra- tion is from chemistry. If you want to get sulphuric acid you put together hydrogen and sulphur and oxygen in defi- nite proportions under definite laboratory conditions. The farmer does the same kind of things. If he wants a crop of potatoes he must put his seed potatoes into the right kind of soil and he must have the right kind of weather. The cook that makes a pudding and the statesman that brings about some social reform use the same method. They all put certain things together and then something happens. We assemble the conditions, which, when they can co-oper- ate, will generate a perfectly definite product. This is the operation of casuality. Things behave in typical ways when brought into conjunction with other things under definite conditions. If they did not we could never know how to do anything; we could not know with any certainty how to build a fire or how to boil an egg. If anything whatever is to be brought about, it has got to be brought about in this way. Somebody must put together the natural forces that will do spontaneously the work to be done. What I call assembling the conditions is technique or method. The technique of progress, to use a rather grand phrase, must be of the same sort. It must be, in the first place, a technique of remedies. We must find out what group of conditions generates the present result, and then what variation in the conditions will alter the result as we wish to alter it. It is not faith in ancient wisdom nor in the myths of ancient po- etry that will keep us here. Our only resources are the casualities that nature puts at our disposal, and the only way to know what these are, is to look for them, to study nature, for there is nothing else that we can use. Science gives us the technique of self-reliance, and the spirit of pa- tiently studying the facts, in order to discover the techniques to which facts lend themselves, I venture to call the spirit of science. We might say that the typical behavior of substances is

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8 THE COLLEGE RECORD. study they may pursue. To make our ideals more reason- able, our methods more effective and our information more complete and accurate — that is a standard that should dom- inate any education. The student that has that standard will come to see that the spirit of science is the spirit of simple truthfulness. I suppose this sounds like a laudation of courses in chem- istry, biology, or engineering, at the expense of history, lit- erature, and language. I do not mean it so. My own in- terests are mainly of the latter sort. Yet study that culti- vates the reminiscent type of mind fails of its purpose; it produces the merely academic imagination, which does not appreciate history, literature and language as facts and real- ities, but only as items in a tradition or in a text book. I don't quite know how to put it. Perhaps I can illustrate what I am trying to mean. Not long ago I knew a student who was very ambitious, very able and extraordinarily industrious. His work was in English literature and he was concentrating all his time and energy upon this subject. Inevitably, he studied chiefly such topics as Elizabethan drama, Victorian poetry, the es- sayists of the 17th century, and other similar chapters in the literature of previous centuries, all extremely interesting and well worth knowing about. I ventured a word of ad- vice, and put it something like this: You are studying the writings of very flue people, who happened to live quite a while ago. But what were those fine people interested in ? Were they interested chiefly in the writings of still earlier Englishmen, or were they interested in the England of their own day and in the Englishmen that were contemporaries? Isn't it quite evident that any writer whose work survives as a stimulating influence, is one who is interested iu the social life they are able to share, namely the life of his own time ? If these gifted people could study here at this university, what would they do? Would they study the literature of the 16th and 17th centuries, or would they study the life and problems of the 20th century ? I am sure they would do the latter? I do not mean to discourage the study of the history of literature. I am much too fond of it to do