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XI The Genesis of Success 68
XII Religion 91

LETTERS FROM A FATHER TO HIS SON ENTERING COLLEGE

My Dear Boy:--I am glad you want to go to college. Possibly I might
send you even if you did not want to go, yet I doubt it. One may send
a boy through college and the boy is sent through. None of the college
is sent through him. But if you go, I am sure a good deal of the
college will somehow get lodged in you.

You will find a thousand and one things in college which are worth
while. I wish you could have each of them, but you can not. You have
to use the elective system, even in the Freshman year. The trouble is
not that so few boys do not seem to know how to distinguish the good
from the bad, but that so many boys do not know the better from the
good and the best from the better. I have known thousands of college
boys, and they do not seem to distinguish, or, if they do, they do not
seem to be able to apply the gospel of difference.

You won't think me imposing on you--will you?--if before entering
college I tell you of some things which seem to me to be most worthy
of your having and being on the day you get your A. B.

The first thing I wish to say to you is that I want you to come out of
the college a thinker. But how to make yourself a thinker is both hard
to do and hard to tell. Yet, the one great way of making yourself a
thinker is to think. Thinking is a practical art. It cannot be taught.
It is learned by doing. Yet there are some subjects in the course
which seem to me to be better fitted than others to teach you this
art. I've been trying to find out what are some of the marks or
characteristics of these subjects. They are, I believe, subjects which
require concentration of thought; subjects which have clearness in
their elements, yet which are comprehensive, which are complex,
which are consecutive in their arrangements of parts, each part
being closely, rigorously related to every other, which represent
continuity, of which the different elements or parts may be prolonged
unto far reaching consequences. Concentration in the thinker,
clearness, comprehensiveness, complexedness, consecutiveness,
continuity--there are the six big C's, which are marks of the subjects
which tend to create the thinker.

To attempt to apply each of these marks to many different subjects of
the curriculum represents a long and unduly stupefying labor. Apply
them for yourself. Diffe