part in the gradual process which turns them from boys and girls into men and women. Education is not a mere operation; it is a coöperation. Two are required for its enriching bargain. On the pupil's side there must be preparedness. He must desire the country for which he sets out, and be energetic in the use of his legs, while leaving the puzzling routes to the selection of his more experienced guides. The second of these papers has the wider scope. Originally prepared for the Woman's College of Western Reserve University, it tries to aid the student in fashioning his ideals and describes what the daily attitude of his mind should be. The first, an address at a Michigan University Commencement, is but an application to a particular field of the ideals thus determined. The first is more practical, probably therefore more easy to understand; the second more theoretic and fundamental. In any discussion of the pair this latter would logically precede. Yet it requires, after all, only a few words of explanation. Whoever enters on a course of discipline with a view to development should assure himself of two things: his actual smallness and his possible largeness. Conviction of either alone spells ruin. The graduate of a college, for example, on entering business must often remind himself that he is no longer a Senior. He is a Freshman once more a little, 1 half-made person, with the ignorance, awkwardness, and discomfort of a beginner. But this is not the whole story. Easy skill lies right ahead, if he will only take the diligent steps to reach it. If because such skill is possible he assumes it his already, he dooms himself to inferiority. But hardly less disastrous is the exclusive sense of incompetence. The two considerations should go together, the belief in a possible largeness illuminating the actual smallness, the smallness quietly acknowledged in contemplating the possible largeness. "A grain of glory mixed with humbleness says George Herbert. The mixture is the important matter. Shame and conceit are thus alike avoided. Dignity is attained; for when imperfection is viewed as but a stage in a process of development, on it falls the glory of its ultimate goal. Such glory of the imperfect, so necessary for the young person to understand, is the subject of my second paper. Probably in few departments of life is the sense of smallness and the desire for largeness so oppressive and so generally confessed as in speech; for language is our chief means of connecting ourselves with others. Detached from them, we feel ourselves helpless. In our times of utmost dependence, therefore, in our first three years, the acquisition of lan guage is our chief business and goes on at a prodigious pace. But as soon as a stock of words is gained just sufficient to establish a rough connection with our fellows, we are apt lazily to pause. To increase the complexity of our ties so as to be able to approach one another in all the subtle shades of our thought and feeling is not at any moment an urgent necessity. In general we feel our feebleness and wish it removed. Why will not some one give us control of our tongue? To gain it ourselves is apt to seem too heavy a task. Now in the paper here placed first I have wished to show how dull is life so long as these conjunctions with our fellow men yes, with our own minds too - remain imperfect. And then, since most of us are already pretty well aware of this dismal fact, and are crippled by it, I devote the substance of the paper to showing the means of escape. Small as we are, a large linguistic power is within the reach of every one. Only it cannot be handed over by somebody else. While a sympathetic teacher can do much in the way of encouragement, example, the correction of errors, and the suggestion of promising lines of effort, the mastery of the tongue must chiefly come from him who owns it. For there is always something original and creative in speech. It is an art that must be felt after, not a science to be learned. The value of what we say is in its expres sion of an individual temperament. Accordingly, our path of advance runs again through the unteachable and spontaneous methods of our first three years. Taking ourselves in charge, we must as thenhave eager interests, swiftly observe, lay hold on all we hear, and be restless until we have conveyed to others that and that only which we have precisely seen and felt. Self-cultivation, in short, must direct the enlargement of our speech. But there is nothing singular in this. In all knowledge, there is an artistic, a creative, element which education is learning every year to prize more highly. The old mechanical curriculum, where the same studies were presented to all minds, is gone. We now see that some sort of personal response is a condition of vital learning. Laboratory and experimental methods, where the student sees truth for himself, are taking the place of book learning. And what does the blundering cry of Original Research mean except that the pupil is to discover by his own means what he desires to know? This importance of self-cultivation in education the Greeks understood long ago. Their word for "I teach" is Sidάoκw; but when they wish to say "I learn," they merely turn the verb for teaching into its middle voice and say didáσкopal, "I teach myself." Self-cultivation! That is the only permanently valuable learning. May the readers of my little book be |