that the narrowest trade or professional
training does something more for a man than to make a skillful practical
tool of him--it makes him also a judge of other men's skill. Whether his
trade be pleading at the bar or surgery or plastering or plumbing, it
develops a critical sense in him for that sort of occupation. He
understands the difference between second-rate and first-rate work in
his whole branch of industry; he gets to know a good job in his own line
as soon as he sees it; and getting to know this in his own line, he gets
a faint sense of what good work may mean anyhow, that may, if
circumstances favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. Sound work,
clean work, finished work; feeble work, slack work, sham work--these
words express an identical contrast in many different departments of
activity. In so far, then, even the humblest manual trade may beget in
one a certain small degree of power to judge of good work generally.

Now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the higher college
training? Is there any broader line--since our education claims
primarily not to be "narrow"--in which we also are made good judges
between what is first-rate and what is second-rate only? What is
especially taught in the colleges has long been known by the name of the
"humanities," and these are often identified with Greek and Latin. But
it is only as literatures, not as languages, that Greek and Latin have
any general humanity-value; so that in a broad sense the humanities mean
literature primarily, and in a still broader sense the study of
masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor. Literature keeps
the primacy; for it not only _consists_ of masterpieces, but is largely
_about_ masterpieces, being little more than an appreciative chronicle
of human master-strokes, so far as it takes the form of criticism and
history. You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teaching it
historically. Geology, economics, mechanics, are humanities when taught
with reference to the successive achievements of the geniuses to which
these sciences owe their being. Not taught thus, literature remains
grammar, art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science a
sheet of formulas and weights and measures.

The sifting of human creations!--nothing less than this is what we ought
to mean by the humanities. Essentially this means biography; what our
colleges should teach is, therefore, biographical history, not tha