his
words, as indeed of his practice, is surely as I give it. And the working
of this spirit is one of the main causes of the curious fact that scarcely
any other class of men in social intercourse feel themselves, in their
deeper concerns, more severed one from another than those very college
professors who ought to be united in the battle for educational
leadership. This estrangement is sometimes carried to an extreme almost
ludicrous. I remember once, in a small but advanced college, the
consternation that was awakened when an instructor in philosophy went to a
colleague--both of them now associates in a large university--for
information in a question of biology. "What business has he with such
matters," said the irate biologist; "let him stick to his last, and teach
philosophy--if he can!" That was a polite jest, you will say. Perhaps; but
not entirely. Philosophy is indeed taught in one lecture hall, and biology
in another, but of conscious effort to make of education an harmonious
driving force there is next to nothing. And as the teachers, so are the
taught.

Such criticism does not imply that advanced work in any of the branches of
human knowledge should be curtailed; but it does demand that, as a
background to the professional pursuits, there should be a common
intellectual training through which all students should pass, acquiring
thus a single body of ideas and images in which they could always meet as
brother initiates.

We shall, then, make a long step forward when we determine that in the
college, as distinguished from the university, it is better to have the
great mass of men, whatever may be the waste in a few unmalleable minds,
go through the discipline of a single group of studies--with, of course, a
considerable freedom of choice in the outlying field. And it will probably
appear in experience that the only practicable group to select is the
classics, with the accompaniment of philosophy and the mathematical
sciences. Latin and Greek are, at least, as disciplinary as any other
subjects; and if it can be further shown that they possess a specific
power of correction for the more disintegrating tendencies of the age, it
ought to be clear that their value as instruments of education outweighs
the service of certain other studies which may seem to be more immediately
utilitarian.

For it will be pretty generally agreed that efficiency of the individual
scholar and unity of the scholarly class are, prop