The Marks of An Educated Man (or Woman) E-Book

Albert Edward Wiggam

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This eBook is a reproduction of an important historical work of Albert Edward Wiggam, which was published between 1925 and 1930. 

In this eBook, you will discover that an educated man (or woman) is not a personality with abundant academic degrees but with the following traits:  ability to cultivates open-mind, ability to listen, never laugh at new ideas, knows the secret of getting along with other people, cultivates the habit of success, controls his/her thoughts, always ready to learn new things, always confidence about his/her skills and many more.

In addition, you will be exposed to the following basic features of Life: Life is Practical (Education must be usable); Life is Dynamic (Education must be vital, alive, and active.); Life is Recreative (Education must train men and women –young and old, for play as well as for work.); Life is friendly (Education should teach humanity the art of friendship with all races, colors and creeds.); Life is cooperative (Education must teach a man/woman his/her place in the community and his/her duties toward it.); Life is idealistic (Education must be practical because life is a hard practical thing; but it must be idealistic because man is a dreamer; and "dreams are the makers and feeders of the world.)

As stated in the book, which was based on the surveyed carried out by Dr. David Mitchell by examining many hundreds of people. If you will ask the next one hundred people you meet what they would do if they had plenty of money and were free to do as they pleased, without a single exception they will answer with the one word, “Travel”.  Also, according to the author, large lustrous eyes may indicate intelligence, but having tested a great many people with large lustrous eyes and found them feeble-minded. Coarse hair does not indicate a coarse nature, and red hair does not indicate a fiery temperament. Blonds and brunets are equally good salesmen, buyers and executives.

I hope this book shall convince the reader that the different in men and women is not the superior of mental ability but merely understanding a difference in mental habits.  Of Course, every educated man or woman must understand this!

Leseprobe

Albert Edward Wiggam

The Marks of An Educated Man (or Woman)

BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

THE MARKS OF AN EDUCATED MAN

THE MARKS OF AN EDUCATED MAN (or WOMMAN)

 By

Albert Edward Wiggam, D. Sc,

Author of:

The New Decalogue of Science

The Fruit of the Family Tree

The Next Age of Man

Exploring Your Mind

PREFACE

This book is not an attempt to write an essay on the philosophy of education or on educational psychology or experimental education. The advances in the science and philosophy of education during the past generation are among the most heartening signs of genuine human progress. But my hope here is simply to make education appear worthwhile, attractive and attainable to the humblest man. I am convinced that, without any increase in our natural abilities we could all be much better educated than we are and consequently much happier and more useful. I wish I might make education seem, as Matthew Arnold said of culture, "a disinterested endeavor after perfection,"—an endeavor that is not a ''having" or a "being" but an eternal "becoming," an eternal becoming something finer, better, happier and more useful; an endeavor that never ceases, an endeavor that loses all its power if it fail for a moment to be disinterested, that loses all its beauty if it be for a less ideal than perfection.

And I hope I shall convince the reader that perfection as some state of unchanging bliss is not only impossible but undesirable, but that, by man's very nature, the going toward it, the striving for it, the adventure, the excitement, the romance of the search is the very perfection that he seeks. The Holy Grail is unattainable and would bring no joy if it were found. To become perfectly educated, therefore, is impossible, but to try to become educated is education—as nearly perfect education as one can have. The experimenters have of course discovered that some ways of striving produce much greater results in learning, achievement and power than other ways; but after all, educational effort, the inner striving "to comprehend the beauty and wonder of the world," and to enrich this beauty and wonder with the flood and glow and passion of your own personality—this is the thing to which men have given the magic name of education.

No one can write such a book without acknowledging his debt on every page to such great masters as William James, Stanley Hall and Edward L. Thorndike; and included herein is also the conscious and unconscious inspiration of so many other of our great present-day psychologists that it would require pages to mention them. In Chapters VII and VIII I am obviously indebted to Dr. David Mitchell, consulting psychologist, and in Chapters XX and XXI to Dean Carl Emil Seashore of the Graduate School of Education of Iowa University.

As in all my books, I am deeply indebted to Mrs. Wiggam for her extensive readings in the massive literature of education and her constant assistance. My secretary, Mr. H. J. Lee, should be mentioned for his patient labor far into some of these spring nights, editing and correcting the manuscript.

Thanks are due to Good Housekeeping, The American Magazine, World's Work and The Scientific Monthly for permission to reprint or rewrite the gist of articles that have appeared in their pages. Some of these articles have brought me thousands of letters from all parts of the world, and I take this opportunity of extending my deep appreciation to those kindly readers.

Albert Edward Wiggam

New York, May 31, 1930.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER  ONE : HE CULTIVATES THE OPEN MIND

CHAPTER TWO : HE COMBINES THE THREE GREAT HERITAGES OF EDUCATION

CHAPTER THREE : HE ACHIEVES THE TECHNIQUES OF OPEN-MINDEDNESS

CHAPTER FOUR: HE ACHIEVES THE TECHNIQUES OF OPEN-MINDEDNESS (CONCLUDED)

CHAPTER FIVE : HE ALWAYS LISTENS TO THE MAN WHO KNOWS

CHAPTER SIX : HE NEVER LAUGHS AT NEW IDEAS

CHAPTER SEVEN : HE KNOWS THE SECRET OF GETTING ALONG WITH OTHER PEOPLE

CHAPTER EIGHT : HE KNOWS THE SECRET OF GETTING ALONG WITH OTHER PEOPLE (CONCLUDED)

CHAPTER NINE : HE CULTIVATES THE HABIT OF SUCCESS

CHAPTER TEN : HE CULTIVATES THE HABIT OF SUCCESS (CONCLUDED)

CHAPTER ELEVEN : HE KNOWS AS A MAN THINKETH SO IS HE

CHAPTER TWELVE : HE KNOWS AS A MAN THINKETH SO IS HE (CONCLUDED)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN : HE KNOWS THAT POPULAR NOTIONS ARE ALWAYS WRONG

CHAPTER FOURTEEN : YOU CAN'T SELL HIM MAGIC

CHAPTER FIFTEEN : YOU CAN'T SELL HIM MAGIC (CONCLUDED)

CHAPTER  SIXTEEN : HE LINKS HIMSELF WITH A GREAT CAUSE

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN :  HE LINKS HIMSELF WITH A GREAT CAUSE (CONCLUDED)

CHAPTER NINETEEN : HE ALWAYS TRIES TO FEEL THE EMOTION HE OUGHT TO FEEL

CHAPTER TWENTY  : HE KEEPS BUSY AT HIS HIGHEST NATURAL LEVEL IN ORDER TO BE HAPPY, USEFUL AND GOOD

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE : HE KEEPS BUSY AT HIS HIGHEST NATURAL LEVEL IN ORDER TO BE HAPPY, USEFUL AND GOOD                        (CONCLUDED)

 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO :  HE KNOWS IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO LEARN

 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE : HE KNOWS IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO LEARN (CONCLUDED)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR  : HE NEVER LOSES FAITH IN THE MAN HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE : HE ACHIEVES THE MASTERIES THAT MAKE HIM A WORLD CITIZEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX : HE CULTIVATES THE LOVE OF THE BEAUTIFUL

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN : HE LIVES A GREAT RELIGIOUS LIFE

CHAPTER ONE : HE CULTIVATES THE OPEN MIND

Whenever I get to thinking about the marks of an educated man, my mind always goes back to an old working man friend, Uncle Noah Smith.

Uncle Noah was a model-maker in the old Wagner plow factory at Vernon, Indiana,—the place I always feel I am away from, although I have lived in many parts of the United States ; and the place you feel you are away from, no matter where you may happen to be, the place that always rests your mind and heart to think about amid the world's grime and turmoil, the place whose memories always come to you with unspoiled sweetness and amid whose magical dreams you plan someday to go back and live again—that is the place that to you will always be home.

Uncle Noah retired after the plow factory moved to Indianapolis in the autumn of 1901. In those days I used to make long lecture trips and when I would come home Uncle Noah would always come over to see me; and when the weather was fine, we often sat out under the old apple tree in the back yard and talked — as you know men will when the air is quiet—of science, love and religion, of money, destiny and God. The old apple tree went down in the big cyclone that struck Vernon at twenty minutes to six o 'clock on the evening of May 26, 1917; but the memory of my talks with Uncle Noah will always remain.

I knew more than Uncle Noah did. He was not a learned man, as the notion goes. I had read more and traveled more and seen more; but I doubt that I had thought or felt more. I doubt that my attitudes of mind, which are the main things in a man's education, were any finer, any richer with the flavors of an untarnished imagination, or any more discriminating between the true and the false, the tawdry and genuine, the trappings and the realities of life, than were Uncle Noah's. He had made the first models for the old Buckeye mowing-machine when it was first invented back in the 'seventies. He was skilled in his craft, and as a matter of course that is the first thing a man must be if he is ever to become educated.

 But a man does not get all of his education out of his work. If he did or could, the problem of each man to achieve his own education would be much simpler than it is now or ever will be. With vast numbers of men, whose sole work is to screw nut 979 and unscrew nut 841, day after day and year after year, education would thus be an automatic process. A man could drop a nickel or a dollar into a slot and get out just the amount of education he had paid for. A great many ambitious parents who send their boys to college seem to imagine that education is that kind of process. But many of them, after dropping five or twenty-five thousand dollars into a collegiate slot, when they get the boy or girl back out of the machine, are both amazed and disillusioned at the meager improvement achieved.

But education is for the whole of life, and work is not the whole of life. In this machine age, when man has applied science to invention and industry and is only beginning to apply it to himself, when society is organized for profit instead of for happiness, and when the " economic man" is probably more nearly realized than at any period in the world's history, it is un fortunately true for enormous numbers of people that work has to be nearly all of life. But a man who has achieved the slightest leisure from the sheer struggle for existence and has no wish to get anything out of life except his work, will never know the nourishing freedom of true education. This is because life is not only work, but is also play and suffering, beauty and pain, joy and sorrow, sunshine and rain, disgrace and glory, darkness, storm and terror, as well as sweetness, peace and light.

No form of work therefore, however rich and varied, can furnish the means for satisfying the entire gamut of even the humblest man's possibilities for entering into all the adventures and exaltations of education. In fact, many a man who regards himself as educated, just because he works eighteen hours a day upon some problem of art or science, would find he could achieve a new mastery over his own problem if he should, now and then at least, catch his breath and remember with Herbert Spencer that "work and learning were made for life, and not life for learning and work.” Provided a man has attained the slightest economic freedom, he must discover that work and learning were made for life, or else he will find, as he approaches the sunset, that he has missed much of the great adventures of education. And just to the degree you have missed education, you have missed life itself.

So, as I was saying, Uncle Noah was not a man of much learning and had worked nearly all his life at one thing, whereas, compared to him, I had a great deal of learning of a sort, and had worked at many things. In contrast to Uncle Noah's limited worldly experiences, I had had rather wide contacts with the world. I had traveled perhaps a quarter of a million miles as a platform lecturer; I had started to college from the farm at the age of fourteen—something  fairly easy in those days when the college course was not much above the present-day third year in high school; I had worked in the chemical laboratory of a sugar factory, had been for a time a gold and silver assayer, superintendent of a mining camp, a police reporter, a traveling salesman, and once I had run a bankrupt hotel and made it pay; I had gone through two pretty long sieges with tuberculosis which had sadly broken up my academic career; I had been an editorialist on a metropolitan daily and had knocked about and been knocked about at numerous other things.

I mention these varied items of experience merely to say that a man may pass through all of them and many more without ever coming even in sight of an education. Some of these experiences help, some do not. I had had an enormous number of them and Uncle Noah had had very few; and yet, as I sit down this afternoon, the seventh day of March, 1930, to dictate a book on some phases of education that have interested me, and as I look back through the mist and mystery of the years since Uncle Noah went to his reward, which I am sure was a great one, I find myself honestly, deeply, sincerely wondering whether I am or ever will be as well educated a man as was my old friend Uncle Noah Smith.

My reason for this feeling is that it has always seemed to me Uncle Noah possessed in an unusual degree a number of the great marks—and those the most essential ones—that my years of knocking against all sorts and conditions of men and all sorts and conditions of educational theories have led me to believe are the mental badges, the habits and attitudes of mind and spirit that distinguish a man of genuine education.

 Above all, Uncle Noah had one characteristic that had grown to be so much a second nature to him- although he had achieved it with effort and humility of spirit—that he did not realize he possessed in it the supreme thing that is preliminary to all education. It is the thing that brings us straight to the one habit of mind, more fundamental, more outstanding, more serviceable than any other in achieving education. Without this very simple but very basic way of looking at the world and at people and at our own experience, education is impossible. True, we see many people who make a great stir in the world, persons of ability, persons who exercise a very wide and often baneful influence, in whom the absence of this habit is the most conspicuous thing about them. An enormous part of the world's misery and mistakes have been directly brought about by people who possessed great mental abilities but who had never achieved this way of using them. It was because Uncle Noah had this habit so deeply rooted in every word he spoke and every thought he expressed that I have always thought of him as having been, in this basic sense, a truly educated man. It is an achievement possible to the humblest man, and without it the greatest man becomes as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. Indeed, most of the sounding brass voices that have misled men in all ages and which, when they get a hearing, mislead them just as much to-day as ever, are voices that have never become informed with this habit of arriving at the truth or falsity of their utterances. It is the first of all the marks of an educated man and it is this:

He keeps his mind open on every question until the evidence is all in.

Uncle Noah was very strong on this point. He used often to say to me, "It does not matter greatly what a man knows or how much he knows; the thing that separates an educated man from an uneducated man more than anything else is howhe learned what he does know."

 In this remark Uncle Noah struck at the roots of every man’s problem with reference to his own education. Moreover he voiced the essence of the problem as to how humanity has ever advanced in its intellectual conquests and how it may hope to go on toward the achievement of a free and intelligent society. We shall see this more clearly if we reflect on what school and college does to some people and fails to do to others. It has been rightly said that about half of what a man learns in school and college is of no use, and that he forgets most of the other half. However, this is not serious, provided he acquired in school and college right habits of learning. If a man learns either in school or in college or, as Uncle Noah did, from work and life, to keep his mind open to new facts, even though some new fact might, so to speak, jab some of his personal opinions in the " proud flesh"; if he has got over being afraid to change his mind, no matter what it may cost his personal pride; if he has got so he is not afraid to think on all sides of every question; if he is not afraid to review carefully and without prejudice the evidence against his own opinions ; above everything else, if he has learned to hold back his judgment and not to come to any conclusion at all until the evidence is all in, or, at least, sufficient evidence to make a rational conclusion possible, then that man will likely wake up some fine morning and find he is one of the most trusted men in his community, and, it may be, one of the great human spirits of his day and generation.

CHAPTER TWO : HE COMBINES THE THREE GREAT HERITAGES OF EDUCATION

This mark of an educated mind—open-mindedness—could easily take us out over the whole history of science and the progress of rational thought, because it is the very essence of the scientific way of looking at the world. It is true that men have lived significant lives without science, but they can never understand the universe in which they live in any other way. It has not been war or natural resources, or changes in trade routes, or differences in economic or political organization that have made men advance or recede, so much as mere changes in mental habits. Only when the method of waiting upon evidence before reaching conclusions, the method of open-minded investigation of the facts of nature, became a mental habit with a number of men, was what we call science born. And the day science was born was the day when humanity started upon the only kind of progress that could possibly be cumulative, self-perpetuating and, so to speak, self-progressive.

I do not believe anyone can understand the miracle of modern life without understanding that not superior mental ability but merely a difference in mental habits has made it all possible. And I want to point out again and again throughout this book that these mental habits can be achieved by everyone and that they constitute the essence of education. I wonder, indeed, if you realize that in order to have electric lights and steam-engines and washing-powders and radios and antitoxins and automobiles and pure milk and airplanes that a few unique and wonderful men called scientists had to introduce a new kind of life into the world. It was not a sudden augmentation of mental ability but a change of mental habits that made all science possible. These marvelous inventions and discoveries are probably due not to our having more ingenious minds than men of former ages, even the men of the Stone Age, but merely to the fact that we use our minds in a different way; to the fact that at least a few men have achieved a new sort of spiritual existence, a habit of deciding things only on evidence. It is this, far more than all else combined, I think, that has made you and me partners in the most brilliant and interesting civilization of all history.

I think we may profitably pause here a moment in order to reflect how dramatic as well as practically interesting it would be if we could only know where and how this habit of mind began ; because, while the average man does not realize it, it is the most extraordinary occurrence in the whole history of mankind. We know a great deal as to where it began but very little as to how. Men had been going along for ages, living, fighting, loving, dying, building civilizations and tearing them down, without ever developing either the interest or the will that is necessary for this mental habit, when, rather suddenly, it laid hold of a number of men and not only began to produce astonishing practical results, but revolutionized the whole outlook of men upon the nature of the universe and the meaning of life itself.

The most masterly account of the beginnings of this new habit in the world—this new way of using the mind—has been recently written by the man who, I think, knows more about the history of science than anyone else, namely, Dr. George Sarton, editor of the intellectualist magazine, Isis, and Associate in the History of Science of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. It is a piece of good fortune for both education and science that Doctor Sarton has planned a majestic history of all science, a work that will run into many volumes and require the labors of a generation.

The first volume of nearly one thousand pages, published in 1927, brings the history of science from the time of Homer down to the period of Omar Khayyam, and in the beautiful and profound introductory chapter of this noble undertaking Doctor Sarton defines science as “systematized positive knowledge.”

It is important to keep this definition in our minds if we are ever to understand what education in the modern sense really means. To be able to systematize knowledge into positive constructive thought constitutes the difference between a man of large information who never gets anywhere with what he knows, and the man who can combine his knowledge into a logical synthetic whole and who does get somewhere. It is the difference between passive items of information and creative knowledge. It was just when this habit of synthetic constructive thinking about nature entered the world that there occurred what will always be known as the "Greek miracle." It is just as much a miracle when it happens to-day in the mind of an individual man as it was in Greece six centuries before Christ, because it constitutes one of the great differences between being educated and uneducated.

In a widely sweeping and penetrating passage, in which the italics are my own, Doctor Sarton eloquently sums up for us the way these efforts to achieve systematized positive knowledge were crystallized by the Greeks with sufficient breadth, continuity and practical fruitfulness to be properly termed a genuine scientific discipline:

One has often spoken of the "Greek miracle' ' with reference to the sudden bloom of a wonderful literature and the unequaled creations of their sculptors and architects, but the development of Greek science was not a bit less marvelous. Of course, we realize now that it was not entirely spontaneous, but rather the fructification of a long evolution of which we find many vestiges in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, and in the Aegean world. Yet what a distance between those crude empirical efforts and the clear-cut, pregnant dicta of the early Greek philosophers and mathematicians! If science is more than an accumulation of facts ; if it is not simply positive knowledge, but systematized positive knowledge; if it is not simply unguided analysis and haphazard empiricism, but synthesis, if it is not simply a passive recording, but a constructive activity ; then, undoubtedly, Hellas was its cradle. The progress of our own studies makes us see more and more clearly how much they borrowed from earlier peoples, but by way of contrast this enhances our opinion of their originality and fortifies our admiration of their scientific genius. It becomes increasingly easy to tell where they found their rough material, but this hardly helps us to understand what enabled them to assume a scientific attitude and to give the earliest conspicuous examples of scientific investigations which were at once deliberate and disinterested. How did it come to pass that some of those early Greek philosophers managed to distinguish scientific issues and to discuss them with a clarity, directness, and freedom from prejudice which remained almost unequaled until modern times? Where did they get that genius for striking the nail on the head? We try to explain this by referring to racial qualities, to geographic and meteorological considerations, to politics and religion, but in reality our explanations do not explain, and it is that very failure which we express when we speak of the Greek miracle.*

Of course a great deal had been discovered about nature prior to the Greeks, and as our archeologists unearth more primitive civilizations, we find more and more where the Greeks got their "rough material" for a scientific approach to nature. But as Doctor Sarton points out, none of this seems to explain where the Greeks got their attitude of mind and their analytical method of thinking about natural phenomena, their marvelous capacity for hitting the nail on the head. It is this and this alone that makes science or that gives us the materials for a critical philosophy of man and the universe. The more thoughtful men of every age have, of course, pondered upon the facts of nature and have sought to wrest a satisfying explanation of these facts from their observations. But it was first in Greece that this effort was communicated widely from man to man and from generation to generation as a continuous mental discipline and an unbroken method of research by which one set of facts could be compared with another set of facts, and some sort of logical picture of nature as a whole be achieved. It was in Greece that this effort of men to understand the world they lived in took on sufficient vitality, depth and continuity to permit it to be called science.

Moreover, these men approached nature with such an unflinching courage that even to-day their effort lays hold of our minds and hearts as the most hopeful and inspiring spiritual development, up to that time, in the annals of men. Previously Jewish peoples by looking within had developed the idea of one God, and this had hitherto been the most significant achievement of the human mind. But the Greeks, looking outward, saw the unity of all nature and saw man as a part of nature, which was an achievement of still greater value, because their fearless investigations developed a unified system of thought about nature on the one hand and, on the other, gave us for all time a method by which knowledge could be progressively accumulated. By this method, and by it alone, could the mental conquests of one man or one age be handed on in such a way that the men of the future could not only repeat the mental operations involved and arrive at the same results, but also, though possessed of no greater mental ability, would have an Archimedes' lever with which they could still more deeply pry open the secrets both of the outer world and of their own minds as well. And as Doctor Sarton intimates, if for the past twenty-five centuries mankind had only walked humbly and constantly in the footsteps of the Greek scientists, the progress of civilization would surely have been greatly accelerated.

I stress at some length the historical development of this new attitude of mind, because it is the very core of any education that to-day can be called liberal, although I do not mean for a moment that it constitutes the whole of education or the only kind of education. But it was this gift of critical thought which came chiefly from the Greeks that offers the largest promise of genuine human progress and universal material comfort, and the happiness that may spring from them. For, as opposed to scientific discoveries and inventions, whatever achievements any age or race makes in politics or art are almost entirely personal, unique and incommunicable. Neither the Greeks nor any other people can tell us how to repeat their superlative triumphs in art and literature. This may for a moment seem strange, because the artist is the most cooperative and communicative of all human beings. His whole passion is to share his emotions, through some outward expression in sculpture, painting, music, dancing, architecture, poetry, fiction or drama, with his fellow men. But he cannot tell how he does it so that others also can do it. This is the most fundamental difference, it seems to me, between art and science although I am ready to admit, as I understand Havelock Ellis to claim, that in its higher reaches science itself may be a form of art. Science makes its achievements by mental processes that can be, to a very great extent at least, taught to others, although it may take the artist to carry these processes to their highest fulfilments. And it is because the Greeks, more than any other race, taught us these mental processes and habits that we owe them as great a debt for their science as we do for their art and literature.

Moreover, if we are ourselves open-minded we must see how the world suffers when this scientific spirit and this clear-eyed looking at nature disappear. I am so eager for the reader to appreciate the whole situation as it has affected the actual lives of men and as it is affecting them to-day that I cannot refrain from quoting another passage from Doctor Sarton's brilliant sketch in which he outlines the long struggle that went on for centuries among various attitudes of mind toward life and God and nature. This struggle constitutes the real essence of the history of Western civilization, and we must understand it in some degree if we are to grasp with any adequacy a true philosophy of education for ourselves. The outlook of an educated man to-day is to an immense extent the outcome of the conflict among ideals of life which have caused the past twenty-five centuries to run red with the blood of men who hated one another, not because of any differences in animal appetites and passions or because they were driven by hunger and animal need, but because they differed in their ideas about nature and God and brotherly love. Differing ideas of brotherly love and to whom and under what circumstances it should be extended, have caused more wars than perhaps anything else in human history. It is at least interesting to see that when the " glory that was Greece" and the “grandeur that was Rome” and the love that was Christianity came into conflict upon the great stage of the ancient world that the varying fortunes of these three actors in the human comedy, namely Grecian science, gaiety and beauty, Roman utilitarianism, legal organization and brute force, and Christian love and theology were to furnish the chief episodes in the great drama of European history.

Doctor Sarton first sketches briefly the meaning of the culture of Alexandria, which was a mixture of Greece, Rome and the Orient. He shows how it "combined some of the noblest features of Greek genius with new aspirations derived from Egyptian and Eastern sources," and points out that the whole Greco-Roman Alexandrian world was subjected to “one of the greatest intellectual conflicts in history, the clash between Greek ideals and various Oriental religions, chiefly Judaism and Christianity,” during which “gigantic struggle between lay and religious ideals . . . every notion was put into the crucible and new scales of value were slowly adjusted.” Describing in bold strokes this tremendous period in human history, Doctor Sarton says:

The reader knows that this protracted struggle ended with the triumph of Christianity. It was a distinct gain from the point of view of morality, but a loss from the point of view of scientific research. This might be considered a third tempering of mankind. The Greeks had taught the nobility of scientific study and that the pursuit of disinterested knowledge is the greatest purification; the Romans had urged the necessity of applying knowledge to immediate needs; the Christians were now insisting that if we have not charity it profits us nothing. The Greeks laid stress upon truth and beauty; the Romans upon strength and usefulness; the Christians, upon love. The value of the last message in a barbarous and cruel world can hardly be overestimated. Unfortunately, most men are incapable of grasping an idea, unless they exaggerate it to the exclusion of all others. Thus, in this case, most of the people who finally understood that charity was essential did not stop there, but jumped to the conclusion that it was all-sufficient. This led them to consider scientific research not only useless, but pernicious. Thus the ruin of science, begun by Roman utilitarianism, was in danger of being completed by Christian piety. It has taken about one millennium and a half to make people generally understand that knowledge without charity and charity without knowledge are equally worthless and dangerous; a great many people do not understand it yet.

It is idle to speculate upon what kind of beings we would be to-day, what sort of lives we would be leading and whether we might not by now be flying on magic carpets, doing away with space and time, and even conquering death itself, if we could only remove the "ifs" from human history. "We often foolishly debate "what might have happened if" so and so had not happened. But it does inflame the imagination with wonder as to what might have been if only Greek culture, sobered from its high gaiety by Roman utilitarianism, stabilized in its political structure by Roman law and given a sounder political morality and a deeper concern for human welfare by Christian charity, could have flowed on uninterrupted in ever widening circles of influence down the centuries. But, as one of the great tragedies of the human advance, Greek culture, with the spirit of pure inquiry into life and nature that it originated, was submerged by Roman utilitarianism. The Romans wanted everything to be useful, they cared little for knowledge that could not be put to practical advantage. In this respect they were like the majority of modern business men: they wanted all scientific investigations to prove profitable—pay their own way at least. The Eomans said, as does the modern business man, "If you can't make money out of it, what 's the use 1 ' ' And when men pursue science, not because it satisfies the endless curiosities of the mind, not from the pure passion to know, but from the desire for use and profit, science itself soon ceases to be profitable. As Doctor Sarton here pungently remarks, "When people determine to care for nothing but what is directly and obviously useful, the days of their own usefulness are already numbered."

I wonder if you might not here recall your boyhood enthusiasm for Lochsley Hall and its prophecies of scientific conquests. You remember the poet sings, with Victorian eloquence, we are the "heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.” When we count up our heritage, we are more likely perhaps to be impressed with our “railroads and our steamships” than we are with "the mighty thoughts that shake mankind.” But the mighty thoughts of men and races constitute nearly all of our real heritage.

So it is we have here spread before us the three fundamental aspects of life that have come down to us as our richest spiritual inheritance from the "tangled mountains of the past" borne upon these three great streams of human thought and experience. We have the Greek heritage with its passion for the true, the beautiful and the good, its sheer joy in living for its own sake but with its tempering capacity for free criticism of its own experience. We have the Roman heritage of power, law, social organization, teamwork, regimentation, not for the individual’s sake but for the good of the State, life conceived of as a thing of grandeur, pomp and circumstance. We have, third, the heritage of the Christian doctrine of love, humility, tenderness, neglect of this life and this world and preparation for a better world to come.

We need not concern ourselves with the struggle that went on among them for supremacy for at least six hundred years until Christianity became the dominating political as well as spiritual and intellectual force of the Western World. The tragedy of the Dark Ages that followed is sufficient proof that when any one of these ideals dominates men's minds, it gives them a life terribly incomplete. Greece failed for many causes, but certainly one of them was its lack of political morality, its tendency to regard political treaties as "scraps of paper" and its consequent continual train of civil wars. Roman life failed as an ideal and, to some extent at least, the Roman State failed as a political entity because of its worship of sheer utility and power and its contempt of fineness and beauty, and of truth for its own sake. While the "honor of a Roman citizen" was a truer and safer thing to depend on than the honor of a Greek, yet the truth of life and the universe as a deliberate study did not interest the Romans unless it was useful in war or commerce. The Christian ideal helped to bring on the Dark Ages because of its contempt, indeed its fear, of free thought and open-minded pagan joy of life and experimentation with life. Later on the Renaissance brought back for a brief moment the glow, joy and beauty of the pagan life of Greece; but once more under Savonarola and the so-called Reformation intellectual freedom was stifled, and the torch of science was for the time being again quenched by Christian theology and the fundamentalist view of life. However, it had been lighted anew by Galileo, Bruno and Bacon, and with varying fortunes the priceless Greek heritage of fearless investigation of nature and courageous experimentation with life has been handed down to us.

Such a sketch as this may easily be misinterpreted because of its vast incompleteness, but that we are the heirs of these three great philosophies of life, the Greek, the Roman and the Christian, and that we now have sufficient political and social freedom throughout the Western World to combine them in due proportion in one great scheme of education and develop from this combined heritage a greater, truer and more beautiful life than has ever been possible in the history of men,—this is a thought I wish I had the power to impress upon the eager and aspiring youth of our time.

Even from this meager outline we must see that men at different times and in different places have lived for almost totally different things. Men always lived for the things that appeared to them valuable. On the whole they do the best they can with the circumstances they have at hand. When we say that life is just what we make it, we mean that life is made up of the values we have learned to assign to things and to experiences. One person learns to place value chiefly on money, another on learning, another on reckless adventure, another on human service, another on beauty, and so on endlessly. Now, education consists in teaching people to value the things that bring the richest and most permanent satisfactions, the highest possible rewards of both body and mind; and while there are infinite ramifications and overlappings, yet we have already seen that we are the inheritors of three great sets of values from the Greek, the Roman and the Christian. We have also seen that none of these peoples succeeded in erecting a permanent political State or enduring economic structure; and, as we look back at it now, it seems clear that these states failed because no one of the schemes of life gave the richest possible set of values to the men who lived them. There is something left out of each of them. There is, indeed, something left out of the life of a man who espouses any one of them to the exclusion of the others. Likewise, there is something left out of the life of a nation that tries to live by only one or two of them. As time goes on it dies, so to speak, by its own hand.

It seems certain that life never meant as much to the citizens of Greece, Rome or Judea as it might have meant had all three of their schemes of life been blended into one. The possibility of such a synthesis was not open to them, although some of the nobler Greek and Roman philosophers endeavored to combine, in their own lives, the three sets of values. But they were not able to impart this spirit to their respective nations. Could they have done so, surely the nations would have endured longer, perhaps permanently.

Possibly I can illustrate these intellectual and emotional phases of education by one or two homely examples. A man devoted exclusively to the Roman ideals of strength gives us little better than a gladiator or prize-fighter. John L. Sullivan and Jack Dempsey are cases in point. Yet I feel sorry for the man who does not find virtues and ideals worth striving for in the lives of Dempsey and Sullivan. I feel sorry for the man who takes no interest in the sporting page of the newspaper. He misses certain honest and robust values that would make his life mean more to himself and to others. But I feel sorry also for the man to whom such characters and such lives represent an all-absorbing ideal. We have millions of such people. And such people are profoundly uneducated; they belong to the Roman mob and would be perfectly ready for some Caesar to feed them free of charge at the public tables. You cannot teach them anything new because they have no openness of mind such as the Greek spirit would have given them by which they could learn anything new. You cannot teach them social responsibilities; you cannot teach them to suffer over public wrongs, but only to shout for their own rights, which means they want what they want to the exclusion of what anybody else may want or need or have a right to. There is in them no Christian softening of their own desires, no tender social sympathy, no insight into social well-being or ill-being.

We can rail at Christianity all we please, its childish, or rather we should say its primitive, conception of nature, its antagonism to science, its intolerance of open-minded inquiry; yet it has given us a heritage, and a very great one, in the concept of unselfishness, of other-worldliness, of concern for the lives and fortunes of other people. Christianity has done more than any other scheme of life to give men a sense of social responsibility. It teaches that each man is his brother's keeper. Alone, it fails and always will fail because it does not teach him how to be an intelligent keeper of his brother. Christianity could never have given men a true morality because only science can do that. It is very well for Christianity to preach that you should love your neighbor as yourself, but how can you love your neighbor intelligently if you do not know what is good for him? And nothing can teach you what is good for your neighbor except experimental science. Christianity can give you the passion to save your neighbor, but only science can give you a workable scheme for his earthly salvation.

On the other hand science alone could never have given men the spirit of social welfare. I know numerous scientists who have a positive contempt for the welfare of their fellows. The notion of helping humanity has never entered their souls as a possessing passion. Of course, they talk in a vague way about their researches and discoveries being a human benefit, but even here, they speak most feelingly of its benefiting "pure science." You could never induce them to leave their laboratories and go either to a prizefight or a meeting for raising funds for the orphans of policemen killed while defending the public safety.

Still further, you find innumerable disciples of the Christian doctrine whose hatred of science is a passion, who believe if there is fun in a thing it must be wicked, who hold up their hands in horror at Sunday baseball and who regard a prize-fight as a brutalizing machination of the devil. They regard smoking a cigar in the same light, and the most temperate use of alcohol as an exhibition of pure human depravity. They pretend to distinguish sharply between the “natural man" and the “spiritual man." Their conception of the spiritual man always seems to me to be the natural man with all the fun taken out of him. They fail to see that life was made for gaiety and beauty, for light-heartedness, and delicacy and fortitude, for risk, hazard, courage and adventure as well as for self-restraint and temperance. In short, they have emphasized one great set of values to the exclusion of all others.

This sort of Christian should open his eyes to the beauties and truths of science, for, if he does not, he fails sadly in his own obligations as a keeper of his brother; if he does not espouse science with all his mind and heart as the chief means of serving his brother effectively, very often his brother will literally perish. In other words, you cannot be a good Christian with any breadth of meaning to the word good without using science, which comes to us from the Greek spirit, to make your goodness truly helpful to your fellow man.

Furthermore, without the Roman strength, endurance, robustness, straightforward hitting-from-the-shoulder, neither Greek science nor Christian love would give us the truly educated man. For a man to be completely educated, therefore, in the modern sense, he must combine within himself these three great schemes of human life, these three sets of values, these three series of meanings. He must be touched with the social passions of Christianity, enlightened by the Greek passion for truth and beauty, and energized by the Roman will to power. Such a man and only such a man is in the modern sense—in every sense—humanistically educated.

CHAPTER THREE : HE ACHIEVES THE TECHNIQUES OF OPEN-MINDEDNESS

I have pleaded in the previous chapters for open-mindedness. But open-mindedness is a very definite achievement. It is not a gift from heaven, at least with the majority of us. It is the most difficult but most worth-while achievement the human mind can make. It is not only an intellectual feat of the first importance, but it goes to the root of a man's character. It colors all his views of life and what he believes about himself, about others, about the world he lives in and his own place in it. If you arrive at your beliefs by the way of open-mindedness you will believe one set of things; if you arrive by the way of tight-mindedness, you will believe quite a different set of things. And you will behave differently, will exercise a different kind of influence. You will have a different sort of personality. In short, you will be a different kind of person as you move through the world.

Consequently, what a man believes is the most important thing about him. As that sometimes extraordinarily wise man, Gilbert K. Chesterton, points out, it is more important for a landlady to know what her boarder believes than to know his income. What a man believes is the innermost man himself and determines his sense of obligation, his manner and degree of cooperation with his fellows, whether he pays his bills or lets the other fellow hold the bag, how he votes on the tariff, or disarmament, or taxing dogs, or subsidizing parents for producing more babies, and how he feels about infant damnation or salvation by blood.

It is one of the most significant developments among modern business men that they are beginning to recognize the importance of a man's beliefs. In hiring and firing a man, they are taking his beliefs into large account. One of the largest employers in America assured me the other day that when interviewing a man who applied for a job, as a machine tender or an executive, one of the first things he did was to try to get at his beliefs—his beliefs about religion, politics, death, taxes, women, money, marriage and the like. These, he said, constitute a man's life, they are why he works and what he works for, and are as essential for an employer to know as is the degree of his technical skill.

In the process of getting at a man's beliefs you become quickly enlightened as to whether he has arrived at them by that particular kind of open-mindedness known as science or by rule of thumb. If he possesses the open-mindedness of science you will find that he always seeks to correct and revise his own opinions, and to find rational and logical explanations of phenomena. If he has arrived at his belief by rule of thumb, you will see that he tries to get evidence that will bolster up the beliefs he already possesses, and to find irrational, magical, short-cut, metaphysical and extra-mundane explanations of the problems of life and mind and the universe. The latter method leads straight to tight-mindedness; and the conflict between these two attitudes of thought and education has caused all the battles of the world. Nearly all human history has been a straight out campaign between the open-minders and the tight-minders.