ves to be cut and fitted accordingly. It is
an aesthetic as well as a practical law that this should be so. The law
of nature where there is room for a man to be a man is not the law of
nature where there is not room for him to be a man. If there is no
playground for his individual instincts except the street he must give
them up. Inasmuch as natural selection in overcrowded conditions means
selecting things by taking them away from others, it can be neither
beautiful nor useful to practise it.

People who prefer to be educated in masses must conform to the law of
mass, which is inertia, and to the law of the herd, which is the Dog. As
long as our prevailing idea of the best elective is the one with the
largest class, and the prevailing idea of culture is the degree from the
most crowded college, all natural gifts, whether in teachers or pupils,
are under a penalty. If we deliberately place ourselves where everything
is done by the gross, as a matter of course and in the nature of things
the machine-made man, taught by the machine-made teacher, in a
teaching-machine, will continue to be the typical scholar of the modern
world; and the gentleman-scholar--the man who made himself, or who gave
God a chance to make him--will continue to be what he is now in most of
our large teaching communities--an exception.

Culture which has not the power to win the emancipation of its teachers
does not produce emancipated and powerful pupils. The essence of culture
is selection, and the essence of selection is natural selection, and
teachers who have not been educated with natural selection cannot teach
with it. Teachers who have given up being individuals in the main
activity of their lives, who are not allowed to be individuals in their
teaching, do not train pupils to be individuals. Their pupils, instead
of being organic human beings, are manufactured ones. Literary drill in
college consists in drilling every man to be himself--in giving him the
freedom of himself. Probably it would be admitted by most of us who are
college graduates that the teachers who loom up in our lives are those
whom we remember as emancipated teachers--men who dared to be
individuals in their daily work, and who, every time they touched us,
helped us to be individuals.

VIII

The Test of Culture

Looking at our great institutions of learning in a general way, one
might be inclined to feel that literature cannot be taught in them,
because the classes