want to touch on two points that arise in connection with
college education, if, even for the sake of argument, we admit that the
primary object of all formal education is the "education" of the
character-capacity in each individual.

Of these two, the first has to do with the college curriculum, but I
need to devote little time to this for the principle has already been
developed and applied in a singularly stimulating and lucid book called
"The Liberal College," by President Meiklejohn of Amherst, to which I
beg to refer you. The scheme is a remarkable blending of the prescribed
and the elective systems, and provides for the freshman year five
compulsory studies, viz.: Social and Economic Institutions, Mathematics
and Formal Logic, Science, English and Foreign Languages; for the
sophomore year European History, Philosophy, Science, Literature, and
one elective; for the junior year American History, History of Thought
and two electives, and for the senior year one required study,
Intellectual and Moral Problems, and one elective, the latter, which
takes two-thirds of the student's time, must be a continuation of one of
the four subjects included in the junior year. It seems to me that this
is a singularly wise programme, since it not only determines the few
studies which are fundamental, and imposes them on the student in
diminishing number as he advances in his work, but it also provides for
that freedom of choice which permits any student to find out and
continue the particular line along which his inclinations lead him to
travel, until his senior year is chiefly given over to the fullest
possible development of the special subject. The fad for free electives
all along the line was one of those curious phenomena, both humorous and
tragic, that grew out of the evolutionary philosophy and the empirical
democracy of the nineteenth century, and it wrought disaster, while the
ironclad curriculum that preceded it was almost as bad along an opposite
line. This project of Dr. Meiklejohn's seems to me to recognize life as
a force and to base itself on this sure foundation instead of on the
shifting sands of doctrinaire theory, and if this is so then it is
right.

For after all there is such a thing as life, and it is more potent than
theory as it also has a way of disregarding or even smashing the
machine. It is this force of life that should be more regarded in
education, and more relied upon. It is the living in a school o