Keuka College - Kiondaga Yearbook (Keuka Park, NY)

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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

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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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10 THE COLLEGE RECORD. for science and the scientific spirit is that they are for- ward-looking, and the problem of literary studies is, it seems to me, how to teach them so that they may cultivate the forward-looking temper of mind. And I have tried to sug- gest how this may be done. To show that the masters of literature have been sensitive, observant, and thoughtful about human life and human prospects, not in the abstract, but in the dramatic present of their own day and country, is to set an example to every student, from which he will see for himself that it is his business to think about real things, effective things, that concern real things to-day. And to find that out for oneself, to possess it as one's own discovery, is, well, no student can do anything that is more stirring and that will do more to vitalize his college work. The student of literature must get the feeling for facts, for evidence and the contempt for sophistry. He has to guard against the disposition to fastidious preferences. No rule can be laid down for accomplishing these things. Every teacher must use his own intelligence and imagination as he best can. And if he is modern and progressive, he may know better what he wants to avoid than what he wants to accomplish. He should, it seems to me, seek to prevent the sluggish deference to tradition, that complacent blankness of imagination which supposes that the present can possibly be just like the past, or the future just like the present. He should make the philosophy of causalty not a living faith, but something clearly comprehended, because in this world things inevitably have consequences, and t he only way we can control the consequences is by controlling the conditions that produce them. And the only way to control the conditions is by knowing the resources, the instrumentalities with which Nature has provided us, and the systematic study of these is the patient labor of science, of sociology as well as physics, of morals as well as chemistry, of the science of curing and training souls as well as of curing and training bodies. The modern teacher, will, in a word, do his best to make his students look to science for the views of the facts and to the happiness of men on earth for their ideals. The spirit of science is not hostile to poetry; it is hostile