ADDRESSES

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

THE NEW DEFINITION OF THE CULTIVATED MAN

CHARLES W. ELIOT, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL

EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION

To produce the cultivated man, or at least the man capable of becoming cultivated in after-life, has long been supposed to be one of the fundamental objects of systematic and thoro education. The ideal of general cultivation has been one of the standards in education. It is often asked Will the education which a given institution is supplying produce ⚫ the cultivated man? Or, Can cultivation be the result of a given course of study? In such questions there is an implication that the education which does not produce the cultivated man is a failure, or has been misconceived, or misdirected. Now, if cultivation were an unchanging ideal, the steady use of the conception as a permanent test of educational processes might be justified; but if the cultivated man of today is, or ought to be, a distinctly different creature from the cultivated man of a century ago, the ideal of cultivation cannot be appealed to as a standard without preliminary explanations and interpretations. It is the object of this paper to show that the idea of cultivation in the highly trained human being has undergone substantial changes during the nineteenth century. I ought to say at once that I propose to use the term "cultivated man in only its good sense-in Emerson's sense. In this paper, he is not to be a weak, critical, fastidious creature, vain of a little exclusive information or of an uncommon knack in Latin verse or mathematical logic; he is to be a man of quick perceptions, broad sympathies, and wide affinities; responsive, but independent; self-reliant, but deferential; loving truth and candor, but also moderation and proportion; courageous, but gentle; not finished, but perfecting. All authorities agree that true culture is not exclusive, sectarian, or partisan, but the very opposite; that it is not to be attained in solitude, but in society; and that the best atmosphere for culture is that of a school, university, academy, or church where many pursue together the ideals of truth, righteousness, and love.

Here someone may think: This process of cultivation is evidently a long, slow, artificial process; I prefer the genius, the man of native power or skill, the man whose judgment is sound and influence strong, tho he cannot read or write-the born inventor, orator, or poet. So do we all. Men have always reverenced prodigious inborn gifts, and

always will. Indeed, barbarous men always say of the possessors of such gifts: These are not men, they are gods. But we teachers, who carry on a system of popular education which is by far the most complex and valuable invention of the nineteenth century, know that we have to do, not with the highly gifted units, but with the millions who are more or less capable of being cultivated by the long, patient, artificial training called education. For us and our system the genius is no standard, but the cultivated man is. To his stature we and many of our pupils may in time attain.

There are two principal differences between the present ideal of culti vation and that which prevailed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. All thinkers agree that the horizon of the human intellect has widened wonderfully during the past hundred years, and that the scientific method of inquiry, which was known to but very few when the nineteenth century began, has been the means of that widening. This method has become indispensable in all fields of inquiry, including psychology, philanthropy, and religion; and therefore intimate acquaintance with it has become an indispensable element in culture. As Matthew Arnold pointed out more than a generation ago, educated mankind is governed by two passions—one the passion for pure knowledge, the other the passion for being of service or doing good. Now, the passion for pure knowledge is to be gratified only thru the scientific method of inquiry. In Arnold's phrases, the first step for every aspirant to culture is to endeavor to see things as they are, or "to learn, in short, the will of God." The second step is to make that will prevail, each in his own sphere of action and influence. This recognition of science as pure knowledge, and of the scientific method as the universal method of inquiry, is the great addition made by the nineteenth century to the idea of culture. I need not say that within that century what we call science, pure and applied, has transformed the world as the scene of the human drama; and that it is this transformation which has compelled the recognition of natural science as a fundamental necessity in liberal education. The most convinced exponents and advocates of humanism now recognize that science is the "paramount force of the modern as distinguished from the antique and the mediæval spirit," and that "an interpenetration of humanism with science and of science with humanism is the condition of the highest culture."

A second modification of the earlier idea of cultivation was advocated by Ralph Waldo Emerson more than two generations ago. He taught that the acquisition of some form of manual skill and the practice of some form of manual labor were essential elements of culture. This idea has more and more become accepted in the systematic education of youth; and if we include athletic sports among the desirable forms of manual

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS, Culture.

skill and labor, we may say that during the last thirty years this element of excellence of body in the ideal of education has had a rapid, even an exaggerated, development. The idea of some sort of bodily excellence was, to be sure, not absent in the old conception of the cultivated man. The gentleman could ride well, dance gracefully, and fence with skill. But the modern conception of bodily skill as an element in cultivation is more comprehensive, and includes that habitual contact with the external world which Emerson deemed essential to real culture. We have lately become convinced that accurate work with carpenters' tools, or lathe, or hammer and anvil, or violin, or piano, or pencil, or crayon, or camelshair brush, trains well the same nerves and ganglia with which we do what is ordinarily called thinking. We have also become convinced that some intimate, sympathetic acquaintance with the natural objects of the earth and sky adds greatly to the happiness of life, and that this acquaintance should be begun in childhood and be developed all thru adolescence and maturity. A brook, a hedgerow, or a garden is an inexhaustible teacher of wonder, reverence, and love. The scientists insist today on nature study for children; but we teachers ought long ago to have learned from the poets the value of this element in education. They are the best advocates of nature study. If any here are not convinced of its worth, let them go to Theocritus, Virgil, Wordsworth, Tennyson, or Lowell for the needed demonstration. Let them observe, too, that a great need of modern industrial society is intellectual pleasures, or pleasures which, like music, combine delightful sensations with the gratifications of observation, association, memory, and sympathy. The idea of culture has always included a quick and wide sympathy with men; it should hereafter include sympathy with nature, and particularly with its living forms, a sympathy based on some accurate observation of nature. The bookworm, the monk, the isolated student, has never been the type of the cultivated man. Society has seemed the natural setting for the cultivated person, man or woman; but the present conception of real culture contains not only a large development of this social element, but also an extension of interest and reverence to the animate creation and to those immense forces that set the earthly stage for man and all related beings.

Let us now proceed to examine some of the changes in the idea of culture, or in the available means of culture, which the last hundred years have brought about.

I. The moral sense of the modern world makes character a more important element than it used to be in the ideal of a cultivated man. Now, character is formed, as Goethe said, in the "stream of the world"-not in stillness or isolation, but in the quick-flowing tides of the busy world, the world of nature and the world of mankind. At the end of the nineteenth century the world was wonderfully different from the world at the beginning of that eventful period; and, moreover, men's means of

making acquaintance with the world were vastly ampler than they were a hundred years earlier. To the old idea of culture some knowledge of history was indispensable. Now, history is a representation of the stream of the world, or of some little portion of that stream, one hundred, five hundred, two thousand years ago. Acquaintance with some part of the present stream ought to be more formative of character, and more instructive as regards external nature and the nature of man, than any partial survey of the stream that was flowing centuries ago. We have, then, thru the present means of reporting the stream of the world from day to day, material for culture such as no preceding generation of men has possessed. The cultivated man or woman must use the means which steam and electricity have provided for reporting the play of physical forces and of human volitions which make the world of today; for the world of today supplies in its immense variety a picture of all stages of human progress, from the stone age, thru savagery, barbarism, and mediavalism, to what we now call civilization. The rising generation should think hard, and feel keenly, just where the men and women who constitute the actual human world are thinking and feeling most today. The panorama of today's events is not an accurate or complete picture, for history will supply posterity with much evidence which is hidden from the eyes of contemporaries; but it is nevertheless an invaluable and a new means of developing good judgment, good feeling, and the passion for social service; or, in other words, of securing cultivation. But someone will say: The stream of the world is foul. True in part. The stream is, what it has been, a mixure of foulness and purity, of meanness and majesty; but it has nourished individual virtue and race civilization. Literature and history are a similar mixture, and yet are the traditional means of culture. Are not the Greek tragedies means of culture? Yet they are full of incest, murder, and human sacrifices to lustful and revengeful gods.

II. A cultivated man should express himself by tongue or pen with some accuracy and elegance; therefore linguistic training has had great importance in the idea of cultivation. The conditions of the educated world have, however, changed so profoundly since the revival of learning in Italy that our inherited ideas concerning training in language and literature have required large modifications. In the year 1400 it might have been said with truth that there was but one language of scholars, the Latin, and but two great literatures, the Hebrew and the Greek. Since that time, however, other great literatures have arisen, the Italian, Spanish, French, German, and above all the English, which has become incomparably the most extensive and various and the noblest of literatures. Under these circumstances it is impossible to maintain that a knowledge of any particular literature is indispensable to culture. Yet we cannot but feel that the cultivated man ought to possess a considerable acquaintance with

the literature of some great language, and the power to use the native language in a pure and interesting way. Thus, we are not sure that Robert Burns could be properly described as a cultivated man, moving poet tho he was. We do not think of Abraham Lincoln as a cultivated man, master of English speech and writing tho he was. These men do not correspond to the type represented by the word "cultivated," but belong in the class of geniuses. When we ask ourselves why a knowledge of literature seems indispensable to the ordinary idea of cultivation, we find no answer except this, that in literature are portrayed all human passions, desires, and aspirations, and that acquaintance with these human feelings, and with the means of portraying them, seems to us essential to culture. These human qualities and powers are also the commonest ground of interesting human intercourse, and therefore literary knowledge exalts the quality and enhances the enjoyment of human intercourse. It is in conversation that cultivation tells as much as anywhere, and this rapid exchange of thoughts is by far the commonest manifestation of its power. Combine the knowledge of literature with knowledge of the "stream of the world," and you have united two large sources of the influence of the cultivated person. The linguistic and literary element in cultivation therefore abides, but has become vastly broader than formerly; so broad, indeed, that selection among its various fields is forced upon every educated youth.

III. The next great element in cultivation to which I ask your attention is acquaintance with some part of the store of knowledge which humanity in its progress from barbarism has acquired and laid up. This is the prodigious store of recorded, rationalized, and systematized discoveries, experiences, and ideas. This is the store which we teachers try to pass on to the rising generation. The capacity to assimilate this store and improve it in each successive generation is the distinction of the human race over other animals. It is too vast for any man to master, tho he had a hundred lives instead of one; and its growth in the nineteenth century was greater than in all the thirty preceding centuries put together. In the eighteenth century a diligent student, with quick powers of apprehension and strong memory, need not have despaired of mastering a large fraction of this store of knowledge. Long before the end of the nineteenth century such a task had become impossible. Culture, therefore, can no longer imply a knowledge of everything—not even a little knowledge of everything. It must be content with general knowledge of some things, and a real mastery of some small portion of the human store. Here is a profound modification of the idea of cultivation which the nineteenth century has brought about. What portion or portions of the infinite human store are most proper to the cultivated man? The answer must be: Those which enable him, with his individual personal qualities, to deal best and sympathize most with nature and with other human