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beings. It is here that the passion for service must fuse with the passion for knowledge. It is natural to imagine that the young man who has acquainted himself with economics, the science of government, sociology, and the history of civilization in its motives, objects, and methods, has a better chance of fusing the passion for knowledge with the passion for doing good than the man whose passion for pure knowledge leads him to the study of chemical or physical phenomena, or of the habits and climatic distribution of plants or animals. Yet, so intricate are the relations of human beings to the animate and inanimate creation that it is impossible to foresee with what realms of nature intense human interests may prove to be identified. Thus the generation now on the stage has suddenly learned that some of the most sensitive and exquisite human interests, such as health or disease and life or death for those we love, are bound up with the life-histories of parasites on the blood corpuscles or of certain varieties of mosquitoes and ticks. When the spectra of the sun, stars, and other lights began to be studied, there was not the slightest anticipation. that a cure for one of the most horrible diseases to which mankind is liable might be found in the X-rays. While, then, we can still see that certain subjects afford more obvious or frequent access to means of doing good and to fortunate intercourse with our fellows than other subjects, we have learned from nineteenth-century experience that there is no field of real knowledge which may not suddenly prove contributory in a high degree to human happiness and the progress of civilization, and therefore acceptable as a worthy element in the truest culture.

IV. The only other element in cultivation which time will permit me to treat is the training of the constructive imagination. The imagination is the greatest of human powers, no matter in what field it works-in art or literature, in mechanical invention, in science, government, commerce, or religion; and the training of the imagination is, therefore, far the most important part of education. I use the term "constructive imagination" because that implies the creation or building of a new thing. The sculptor, for example, imagines or conceives the perfect form of a child ten years of age. He has never seen such a thing, for a child perfect in form is never produced; he has only seen in different children the elements of perfection, here one element and there another. In his imagination he combines these elements of the perfect form, which he has only seen separated, and from this picture in his mind he carves the stone, and in the execution invariably loses his ideal—that is, falls short of it, or fails to express it. Sir Joshua Reynolds points out that the painter can picture only what he has somewhere seen; but that the more he has seen and noted, the surer he is to be original in his painting, because his imaginary combinations will be original. Constructive imagination is the great power of the poet as well as of the artist; and the nineteenth century has convinced us that it is also the great power of the

man of science, the investigator, and the natural philosopher. What gives every great naturalist or physicist his epoch-making results is precisely the imaginative power by which he deduces from masses of fact the guiding hypothesis or principle.

The educated world needs to recognize the new varieties of constructive imagination. Dante gave painful years to picturing on many pages of his immortal comedy of hell, purgatory, and paradise the most horrible monsters and tortures, and the most loathsome and noisome abominations, that his fervid imagination could concoct out of his own bitter experiences and the manners and customs of his cruel times. Sir Charles Lyell spent many laborious years in searching for and putting together the scattered evidences that the geological processes by which the crust of the earth has been made ready for the use of man have been, in the main, not catastrophic, but gradual and gentle; and that the forces which have. been in action thru past ages are, for the most part, similar to those we may see today eròding hills, cutting cañons, making placers, marshes, and meadows, and forming prairies and ocean floors. He first imagined, and then demonstrated, that the geologic agencies are not explosive and cataclysmal, but steady and patient. These two kinds of imagination-Dante's and Lyell's-are not comparable, but both are manifestations of great human power. Zola in La Bête humaine contrives that ten persons, all connected with the railroad from Paris to Havre, shall be either murderers or murdered, or both, within eighteen months; and he adds two railroad slaughters criminally procured. The conditions of time and place are ingeniously imagined, and no detail is omitted which can heighten the effect of this homicidal fiction. Contrast this kind of constructive imagination with the kind which conceived the great wells sunk in the solid rock below Niagara that contain the turbines, that drive the dynamos, that generate the electric force that turns thousands of wheels and lights thousands of lamps over hundreds of square miles of adjoining territory; or with the kind which conceives the sending of human thoughts across three thousand miles of stormy sea instantaneously on nothing more substantial than ethereal waves. There is no crime, cruelty, or lust

about these last two sorts of imagining. No lurid fire of hell or human passion illumines their scenes. They are calm, accurate, just, and responsible; and nothing but beneficence and increased human well-being. results from them. There is going to be room in the hearts of twentiethcentury men for a high admiration of these kinds of imagination, as well as for that of the poet, artist, or dramatist.

Another kind of imagination deserves a moment's considerationthe receptive imagination which entertains and holds fast the visions genius creates or the analogies of nature suggest. A young woman is absorbed for hours in conning the squalid scenes and situations thru which Thackeray portrays the malign motives and unclean soul of Becky

Sharp. Another young woman watches for days the pairing, nesting, brooding, and foraging of two robins that have established home and family in the notch of a maple near her window. She notes the unselfish labors of the father and mother for each other and for their little ones, and weaves into the simple drama all sorts of protective instincts and human affections. Here are two employments for the receptive imagination. Shall systematic education compel the first, but make no room for the second? The increasing attention to nature study suggests the hope that the imaginative study of human ills and woes is not to be allowed to exclude the imaginative study of nature, and that both studies may count toward culture.

It is one lesson of the nineteenth century, then, that in every field of human knowledge the constructive imagination finds play-in literature, in history, in theology, in anthropology, and in the whole field of physical and biological research. That great century has taught us that, on the whole, the scientific imagination is quite as productive for human service as the literary or poetic imagination. The imagination of Darwin, or Pasteur, for example, is as high and productive a form of imagination. as that of Dante, or Goethe, or even Shakespeare, if we regard the human uses which result from the exercise of imaginative powers, and mean by human uses not merely meat and drink, clothes and shelter, but also the satisfaction of mental and spiritual needs. We must, therefore, allow in our contemplation of the cultivated man a large expansion of the fields in which the cultivated imagination may be exercised. We must extend our training of the imagination beyond literature and the fine arts, to history, philosophy, science, government, and sociology. We must recognize the prodigious variety of fruits of the imagination that the nineteenth century has given to our race.

It results from this brief survey that the elements and means of cultivation are much more numerous than they used to be; so that it is not wise to say of any one acquisition or faculty: With it cultivation becomes possible; without it, impossible. The one acquisition or faculty may be immense, and yet cultivation may not have been attained. Thus, it is obvious that a man may have a wide acquaintance with music, and possess great musical skill and that wonderful imaginative power which conceives delicious melodies and harmonies for the delight of mankind thru centuries, and yet not be a cultivated man in the ordinary acceptation of the words. We have met artists who were rude and uncouth, yet possessed a high degree of technical skill and strong powers of imagination. We have seen philanthropists and statesmen whose minds have played on great causes and great affairs, and yet who lacked a correct use of their native language, and had no historical perspective or background of hist torical knowledge. On the other hand, is there any single acquisition or faculty which is essential to culture, except, indeed, a reasonably accurate

and refined use of the mother-tongue? Again, tho we can discern in different individuals different elements of the perfect type of cultivated man, we seldom find combined in any human being all the elements of the type. Here, as in painting or sculpture, we make up our ideal from traits picked out from many imperfect individuals and put together. We must not, therefore, expect systematic education to produce multitudes of highly cultivated and symmetrically developed persons; the multitudinous product will always be imperfect, just as there are no perfect trees, animals, flowers, or crystals.

It has been my object this evening to point out that our conception of the type of cultivated man has been greatly enlarged, and on the whole exalted, by observation of the experiences of mankind during the last hundred years. Let us as teachers accept no single element or kind of culture as the one essential; let us remember that the best fruits of real culture are an open mind, broad sympathies, and respect for all the diverse achievements of the human intellect at whatever stage of development they may actually be-the stage of fresh discovery, or bold exploration, or complete conquest. Let us remember that the moral elements of the new education are individual choice of studies and career among a great, new variety of studies and careers, early responsibility accompanying this freedom of choice, love of truth now that truth may be directly sought thru rational inquiry, and an omnipresent sense of social obligation. These moral elements are so strong that the new forms of culture are likely to prove themselves quite as productive of morality, high-mindedness, and idealism as the old.

THE PRESENT PERIL TO LIBERAL EDUCATION

ANDREW F. WEST, DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, PRINCETON, N. J.

The cause of liberal education, like the cause of political liberty, is always worth preserving and always in peril. In such causes, if anywhere, men need to be ever resolute as well as intelligent; for only thus does it become possible, even when distressed, to face grave crises without becoming for an instant pessimistic, inasmuch as the priceless value of what we are seeking to defend assures us that our efforts are well worth making, and that no effort is too great in maintaining so good a cause.

We have such a cause today, the cause of liberal education. I need not argue in this presence that, as it prevails, our American life is lifted, ▾ and that, as it fails, our American life is degraded. It is today, as ever, in peril, but in unusual peril as embodied in its noblest representative, the American college.

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Let us picture the situation in its worst possible outcome. Suppose the chances are that the college is to fail, to be crushed out between the upper and nether millstones of professional and secondary schools byreason of the violent demand for something more "practical." What then? If it must go, it must go, of course. But ought it to go? And above. all, ought it to go without a struggle? Those who know most about colleges. think not, while those who know least about them—and they form a huge majority are often indifferent and sometimes hostile. Scarcely one in a hundred of your young men of college age has gone to college. They, at least, are with the college, and so is the rest of the better intelligence of the land. But educated intelligence does not always prevail over ignorance, even in deciding matters of education. One can hardly fail, when painting the danger at its blackest, to recall the great words of Stein, when appealing to his fellow-Prussians in the Napoleonic wars: "We must look the possibility of failure firmly in the face, and consider well . . . . that this contest is begun less in regard to the probability of success than to the certainty that without it destruction is not to be avoided."

It is by no means as black as that, nor does it seem likely to become So. But even if the peril were far greater than it is, there would be no good reason why we should not continue the struggle. There is good reason to believe that the forces with us, are strong enough not only to save but to strengthen, the American college, and that, when once its real value is brought home anew to the minds and consciences of men, it will assert its rights with ample power.

Let us think for a moment of what the American college is. It has been evolved out of our own needs and has proved its extraordinary usefulness by a long record. It has been democratic in its freedom of access aud in the prevailing tone of its life. It has furnished our society and state with a small army of well-trained men. In it supremely are centered our best hopes for liberal education, both as focused in the college itself and as radiating outward on the secondary schools below and the professional schools above. It is the best available safeguard against the mechanical cramping of an unliberalized technical education. It is our one available center of organization for true universities. It has produced a class of men unequaled in beneficent influence by any other class of equal numbers in our history.

In the rush of American life it has stood us the quiet and convincingteacher of higher things. It has been preparing young men for a better career in the world by withdrawing them a while from the world to culti vate their minds and hearts by contact with things intellectual and spiritual,◄ in a society devoted to those invisible things on which the abiding greatness of our life depends. By reason of this training most college men have become better than they would have been, and better in important respects than they could have been, had they not gone to college. Their

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