ominantly classic, or scientific, or
esthetic, or empiric? Many, or much? For accomplishment, or for
accomplishing? Shall it fit for the tour of Europe, or for the journey
of life? Masculine and feminine, or vaguely human? Shall it rattle
with the drum-beat, bound with gymnastics, court fame by excursive
"nines" not known on Helicon, and challenge British Oxford, alas? with
its boat crew? Shall the American College student follow his option,
or his curriculum? And shall the college itself be a school for
schoolmasters, a collection of debating clubs, a reading-room with
library attached, an intellectual quarantine for the plague of riches?
or, a place of close and protracted drill, of definite methods, of
prescribed intellectual work? Shall it fulfill the statement of the
Concord sage,--'You send your son to the schoolmasters, and the
schoolboys educate him?' or, shall a strong faculty make and mark the
whole tone of the institution?

"In these and other forms is the same fundamental question still
thrust sharply before us. I do not propose to move directly on such a
line of bristling bayonets, but to make my way by a flank movement
across this "wilderness" of conflict. It will go far towards
determining the methods of a liberal education, if we first ascertain,
as I propose to do, The Chief Elements of a Manly Culture.

"Obviously the primal condition of all else must be found in a
self-prompted activity or wakefulness of intellect. The time when the
drifting faculties begin to feel the helm of will, when the youth
passes from being merely receptive to become aggressive, marks the
advent of the true human era. As in the history of our planet the
first remove from the _tohu va-vohu_ was when the Spirit of God
brooded on the deep, and, obedient to the command, light shot out from
darkness, so in man the microcosm, the brooding spirit and commanding
purpose mark the first step from chaos toward cosmos. The mechanical
intellect becomes dynamical, and the automatic man becomes autonomic.
It may be with a lower or a higher motion. The mind gropes round
restlessly by a yearning instinct; it may be driven by the strong
impulse of native genius; or, it may rise to the condition of being
the facile servant of the forceful will. When the boy at Pisa
curiously watches the oil lamp swinging by its long chain in the
cathedral, a pendulum begins to vibrate in his brain, and falling
bodies to count off their intervals; and when afte