ommon sense still goes on. Four, or six,
or ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he
leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books
for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our
colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty
years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met
with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato.

But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country
should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing?
What was the consequence? Some intelligent persons said or thought,
'Is that Greek and Latin some spell to conjure with, and not words of
reason? If the physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come
at their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring is gone
out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating, and go straight to
affairs.' So they jumped the Greek and Latin, and read law, medicine, or
sermons, without it. To the astonishment of all, the self-made men took
even ground at once with the oldest of the regular graduates, and in
a few months the most conservative circles of Boston and New York had
quite forgotten who of their gownsmen was college-bred, and who was not.

One tendency appears alike in the philosophical speculation and in the
rudest democratical movements, through all the petulance and all the
puerility, the wish, namely, to cast aside the superfluous and arrive
at short methods; urged, as I suppose, by an intuition that the human
spirit is equal to all emergencies, alone, and that man is more often
injured than helped by the means he uses.

I conceive this gradual casting off of material aids, and the indication
of growing trust in the private self-supplied powers of the individual,
to be the affirmative principle of the recent philosophy, and that it is
feeling its own profound truth and is reaching forward at this very hour
to the happiest conclusions. I readily concede that in this, as in every
period of intellectual activity, there has been a noise of denial and
protest; much was to be resisted, much was to be got rid of by those
who were reared in the old, before they could begin to affirm and to
construct. Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish; and that
makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not
equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in th