lt, and known. In the nature of
things no educational material can be richer; none so fundamentally
expansive and illuminative.

This contact with the richest personalities the world has produced is
one of the deepest sources of culture; for nothing is more truly
educative than association with persons of the highest intelligence
and power. When a man recalls his educational experience, he finds
that many of his richest opportunities were not identified with
subjects or systems or apparatus, but with teachers. There is
fundamental truth in Emerson's declaration that it makes very little
difference what you study, but that it is in the highest degree
important with whom you study. There flows from the living teacher a
power which no text-book can compass or contain,--the power of
liberating the imagination and setting the student free to become an
original investigator. Text-books supply methods, information, and
discipline; teachers impart the breath of life by giving us
inspiration and impulse. Now, the great books are different from all
other books in their possession of this mysterious vital force; they
are not only text-books by reason of the knowledge they contain, but
they are also books of life by reason of the disclosure of personality
which they make. The student of "Faust" receives from that drama not
only the poet's interpretation of man's life in the world, but he is
also brought under the spell of Goethe's personality, and, in a real
sense, gets from his book that which his friends got from the man.
This is not true of secondary books; it is true only of first-hand
books. Secondary books are often products of skill, pieces of
well-wrought but entirely self-conscious craftsmanship; first-hand
books are always the expression of what is deepest, most original and
distinctive in the nature which produces them. In such books,
therefore, we get not only the skill, the art, the knowledge; we get,
above all, the man. There is added to what he has to give us of
thought or form the inestimable boon of his companionship.

The reality of this element of personality and the force for culture
which resides in it are clearly illustrated by a comparison of the
works of Plato with those of Aristotle. Aristotle was for many
centuries the first name in philosophy, and is still one of the
greatest; but Aristotle, although a student of the principles of the
art of literature and a critic of deep philosophical insight, was
pr