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 his 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.

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 by reason 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 convincing teacher 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 cultivate 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

vision has been cleared and widened, and their aims have been elevated. Not least of all, they have been taught incessantly the lesson, so deeply needed to steady them in our fiercely practical surroundings, that the making of a good living is not so important as the making of a good life. The college has proved its right to live. To preserve, maintain, and energize it to its highest capacity for good, to prune its excesses, strengthen its weak places, and supply its needs, is therefore the bounden duty of those who care for the best interests of our nation.

The perils which beset it come from various sources: first, from the common defects of our American civilization; second, from the weaker tendencies in young men; and, third, from the confusion of counsels inside the college itself. The first two we must be prepared to encounter always, but the last one ought to be avoidable.

This is no place to draw up a catalog of our common defects as a people. Our virtues we know well. They are self-reliance, quick ingenuity, adventurousness, and a buoyant optimism. Our national faults are not so pleasant to think of as, for example, the faults of boastful vul garity and reckless excitability. Yet there are some that must be mentioned as being especially perilous to our college education. The chief oņe, I think, is commercialism the feverish pursuit of what "pays" as the one end of life. Are we not subjected today, as never before, to demands for teaching the things of commerce as part of the college course? And are not the mechanical arts and crafts, admirable indeed in their true uses, trying to mix in with the other things, as tho they were of the same family of studies, and saying they must have room in the same house, even if other members of the family are pushed out? Are not technical studies being called liberal, and is not even the technique of the professions sometimes labeled liberal also, on the plea that all knowledge is liberalizing? So it is, but in what differing degrees and senses! The instinct for the useful is being perverted and exalted above the love of knowledge as a chief end. And why? Because what is wanted is something immediately, obviously, almost mercenarily useful. Is it not time we read again the books of philosophy to learn again that the true utility is the long utility which serves to make a whole life useful, and that it is the end for which men live that makes them useful and useless? Do we not feel that we are here coming close to the sanctions of religion, and need to answer that deep question, "What shall it profit a man?" once more?

Another peril is a companion and natural follower of commercialism, namely, illiteracy; not in the meaning of that word in the census tables, but in the meaning of ignorance of good literature. "No man can serve books and Mammon," said Richard de Bury long ago. Is it not a fact that the majority of college students today are not familiar with the commonplaces of literary information and the standard books of history, poetry, and so on? Do they know that greatest book of our tongue, the English Bible, as their

fathers did? What have so many of them been reading? The newspapers, of course, and fiction—not always the better fiction. As between books and the short stories in magazines, how few read the former! I am not now speaking of the handbooks of philosophy and science, or generally of the books that involve severe thought, but of the readable, delightful books, the pleasant classics of English. What a confession of the state of things it is that colleges have to make the reading of a few books of English literature a set task as an entrance requirement, and then ask formal questions on what ought to be the free and eager reading of every boy at home! How far it is true that the advocacy of teaching science may have operated, not to beget a taste for science, but merely a neglect of literature, is perhaps idle to ask. It is at least true that these neglecters of literature are not usually giving laborious hours to reading scientific works. Perhaps some day our schools generally will get "Readers" that have literature in them, and that will help matters a little. But the socalled students who do not care to read, or do not know how to read as all students should, are with us in abundance as an ever-present peril. The quiet book by the quiet lamp is a good charmer. Here the true student forms his friendships with the masters of thought and fancy; here they speak to him, not under the constraints of the class-room; here he may relax without weakness, adventure without limit, soar without fear, and hope without end. It is the old story. It is the old story. Books are, as Huxley put it, "his main helpers," and the free reading outside the set tasks is, perhaps next to music, his most ennobling pleasure. The loss of this is today the thing that does so much to deprive our college life and conversation of the fine flavor of that much misunderstood thing, Culture.

It is a disposition

Another peril comes from the students themselves. to do the pleasant rather than the hard thing, even when the hard thing happens to be the best thing. This is most common among those whose main interest in college life is social. It is also fostered by the general absorption in athletics, tho it is not so much the athletes who are affected—for they are at least used to a vigorous discipline in things physical-as it is the mass of onlookers who attend the games and waste so much time discussing them. This social and athletic environment with all its undeniable and, I believe, indispensable goodis just now doing much harm to the intellectual life of students. Because it is unduly exaggerated, it is operating powerfully to disperse the student's energies in a miscellany of things outside his studies. Things which should come second, as the relaxation of those whose first business is study, often come first, and studies must get what they can of what is left. How natural it is that such students should crowd into the easier courses! They have little interest left for anything intellectual. So far as this occurs, liberal education dies, and college students come to their manhood with men's bodies and boys' minds. What is being lost is