Keuka College - Kiondaga Yearbook (Keuka Park, NY)

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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

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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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THE COLLEGE RECORD. W tli.it, but those writers of the past were modern people in their own day, ami you will get their Spirit and their nics- sage all the better it' you too are a modern person, and if you get the spirit of tho workers who study the problems that are about us now, you need not change your line of work, but get the spirit of modern inquiry so that you may get at the heart and not merely the literary trappings of Spenser and Shakespere and Ben Johnson and Dryden and Shelley. The adviee was taken, as far as circumstances permitted, and the student began visiting courses in sociolo- gy, political economy and anthropology. The effect of it upon the English work was remarkable. What I call the reminiscent quality disappeared. The facts of history were not viewed as items in a tradition, because the student had become emancipated from the idea of tradition. Questions of literature were treated like questions of economics, in a free and independent way. The student felt, perhaps for the first time, that he had a right to really use his own mind, and only when study has this quality of self- reliance it is very profitable or very interesting. The difference is all in the spirit of the hour. Whether one studies poetry or comparative anatomy, the work can be done in what I call the spirit of science, that is, the spirit of dealing with facts and not with convictions which every gentleman and lady is expected to share. In science, opinions are respectable in so far as they have the evidence behind them, i. e., in so far as they have the marks of being true. The respect for evidence is a form of loyalty to truth, of allegiance to the facts, and studies that do not show entire respect for evidence and for facts cannot hold the respect of honest students. Education succeeds on its moral side where it cultivates the instinctive recogni- tion of sophistry and the instant contempt for it. One superiority of scientific training is that it gives those who go in for it a technique that they can use for a career. This is for many of those who believe in higher things than bread and butter, a ground for criticism. Anyone can look forward to very different things, to cheap and selfish things as well as to noble things, but what I am trying to claim