Page images
PDF
EPUB

seen reflected in the moral tone of your clergyman on the following day."

It is the unity of human nature that makes the training of an individual American college student such a vastly important thing; for only by extreme clearness of individual thought do we attain the requisite for the great citizenship. What is the world for, with its vast and tantalizing problem? What is life for, with its seemingly inscrutable incongruities? What is college for? The answer to all these questions turns out to be very nearly the same, and its full meaning is a faith in the efficacy of the well-rounded mind.

To know so much about life through experience, and through science, art, and philosophy, which are experience typified, that one is convinced of the need for bearing a noble part in the world, is the purpose of going to college. And the true purpose of the college itself as part of the state is to increase that great society of men and women who are dedicated to the principle of idem sentire de republica of thinking together about public affairs-not in the sense of all thinking alike, but in the sense of all wishing to act with that broad and generous intelligence which has been inculcated by the same training and which is fostered by memories and ideals held in common.

[NOTE: At the end of this series of essays a number of questions, on which the student has been writing, will present themselves in a new light, and they may perhaps be worth rediscussing. His mind is equipped for more I urbane and farther-sighted arguments, for weightier explanations, for more pointed records of his own experience. In the light of President Hyde's brief characterization of Oxford (Chapter XI), and of Cardinal Newman's description of what sort of outlook on life a university ought to cultivate (Chapter XII, Section V), and of Stevenson's "Apology for Idlers" (Chapter XVIII), the reader will very likely perceive the real differences between Oxford and American methods, where at first he only caught at rather trivial and superficial aspects. Or he may find, after reading “The Great Analysis,” that he has a new opinion about Colonel Roosevelt's arguments

against peace, and about the question whether empire is a valid ideal for the United States. When he has finished Mr. Chapman's essay he may well perceive a new significance in William James's saying, that the end of college education is ability to know a good man when you see him. Such reference of one set of ideas to another is the truest way of deepening thought and of producing that enlargement of which Cardinal Newman speaks in the quotation placed at the beginning of this book. In this connection it may also be well to note Edmund Burke's advice about reading: 'Reading, and much reading, is good. But the power of diversifying the matter infinitely in your own mind, and of applying it to every occasion that arises, is far better; so don't suppress the vivida vis."]

[ocr errors]

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The editor wishes to express his sincere appreciation of the generosity of authors and publishers whose permission to reprint articles and parts of books has made it possible to carry out the purpose of this volume. To Professor Byron Rees, of Williams College, and to Professor W. D. Howe and Mr. F. C. Senour, of Indiana University, the editor is indebted for valuable suggestions, and to Mr. Horace O'Connor and Doctor Robert Withington for much help in technical difficulties.

COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE

« PreviousContinue »