< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu
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EDUCATION FOR PROFESSIONS.

443

the most highly organized brains and bodies to reproduce themselves as much as possible, while forcing the inferior and incompetent ones to the opposite direction.' This reform secures evolutional perfectibility, while the educational reform meets the conditions of superadded perfectibility; and only thus can the greatest of human problems be solved.[1]

The same idea is expressed in somewhat different words, and as viewed by Huxley's different type of mind, from a different standpoint, thus:

That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic-engine, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order, ready, like the steam-engine, to be turned to any kind of work and spin the gossamers, as well as forge the anchors, of the mind; whose mind is stored with knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of nature and of the laws of her operations; who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will; the servant of a tender conscience who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.[2]

The right sort of a liberal education obviously begins in childhood with the growth of the observational faculties, continues through youth with the development of the power of comprehension and reflection, is finally terminated, so far as formal education goes, with those studies which are the expression of the thoughts or of the discoveries or of the deductions of great minds and which demand the employment of mature, acute, powerful and trained talent.

This is the university period, and if this can be prefaced to the professional training the man is indeed fortunate. It is the modern incorporation of the Miltonian ideal into our educational work that makes it possible for one of our ablest business men to say:

It used to be assumed that education was a hindrance to 'success in life.' The great merchant was to begin by sweeping out the store. The weakling was the proper candidate for college, whence a living might be assured him in the church or other 'learned profession.' A college education was thought a handicap against 'practical' achievement. This superstition is one of the husks the world has thrown off.[3] In an ideal university, as I conceive it, says Huxley, almost in the words of Cornell, a man should be able to obtain instruction in all forms of knowledge and discipline in the use of all the methods by which knowledge is obtained. In such a university, the force of living example should fire the student with a noble ambition to emulate the learning of learned men and to follow in the footsteps of the explorers of new fields of knowledge. And the very air he breathes should be charged with that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism of veracity, which is a greater possession than much learning, a nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; by so much greater and nobler than these
  1. ↑ August Forel, University of Zurich.—'Current Encyclopedia,' November, 1901.
  2. ↑ Huxley, Vol. II., p. 320.
  3. ↑ 'Of Business,' It. R. Bowker, 1901.
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