d by
the ideals of intellectual and moral excellence. For the trained mind
even to think is difficult, and for them independent thought is almost
impossible. They do not know the little less than creative power of
right education, or that as we are changed by action, we are
transformed by thought. What patient labor may do to exalt and refine
the mental faculties, until we become capable of entering into the life
of every age and every people, has not been shown to them; and hence
they are not inspired by the high hope of dwelling, in very truth, with
all the noble and heroic souls who have passed through this world and
left record of themselves. We bid the youth learn many things which he
cannot but find both useless and uninteresting. And yet unless we
discover the secret of winning him to the love of study, the educational
value of what he learns is lost; for what leaves him unmoved, leaves him
unimproved. His information and accomplishments are comparatively
unimportant. What he himself is, and what his real self gives us grounds
for hoping he shall become, is the true concern. To be able to translate
AEschylus or Plato is not a great thing; but it is a great thing to have
the Greek's sense of what is fair, noble and intellectual. To be able to
solve a complex mathematical problem may be unimportant; but to have the
mental habit of accurate, close, patient thinking is important. It is
easy to forget one's Greek or the higher mathematics; but an
intellectual or a moral habit is not easily lost.

He who has right habits will go farther and rise higher than he who has
only brilliant attainments. It is an error, and a very common one, to
suppose that education is merely, or chiefly, a mental process, and
consequently that the best school is that in which the various kinds of
knowledge are best taught. Our whole being, physical, intellectual, and
moral, is subject to the law of education. We may educate the eye, the
ear, the hand, the foot; and each member of the body may be trained in
many ways. The eye of the microscopist has received a training different
from that of the painter; the sculptor's hand has been taught a cunning
unlike that of the surgeon; the voice of the orator is developed in one
way, that of the singer in another. And so the faculties of the mind may
be drawn forth, and each one in various ways. The powers of observation,
of reflection, of intuition, of imagination, are all educable. One of
the most i