ee whether the economic
applications will make this grip firmer or weaker, and this insight
clearer or more obscure. I trust that this point is plain, for it
illustrates what I have just said regarding the danger of following a
popular demand. We need no experiment to prove that economic science is
more useful in the narrow sense than is pure science. What we wish to
determine is whether a judicious mixture of the two sorts of teaching
will or will not enable us to realize this rich cultural value much more
effectively than a traditional purely cultural course.

Now that illustrates what I think is the real and important application
of the scientific spirit to the solution of educational problems. You
will readily see that it does not do away necessarily with our ideals.
It is not necessarily materialistic. It is not necessarily idealistic.
Either side may utilize it. It is a quite impersonal factor. But it does
promise to take some of our educational problems out of the field of
useless and wasteful controversy, and it does promise to get men of
conflicting views together,--for, in the case that I have just cited, if
we prove that the right admixture of methods may enable us to realize
both a cultural and a utilitarian value, there is no reason why the
culturists and the utilitarians should not get together, cease their
quarreling, take off their coats, and go to work. Few people will deny
that bread and butter is a rather essential thing in this life of ours;
very few will deny that material prosperity in temperate amounts is good
for all of us; and very few also will deny that far more fundamental
than bread and butter--far more important than material prosperity--are
the great fundamental and eternal truths which man has wrought out of
his experience and which are most effectively crystallized in the
creations of pure art, the masterpieces of pure literature, and the
discoveries of pure science.

Certainly if we of the twentieth century can agree upon any one thing,
it is this: That life without toil is a crime, and that any one who
enjoys leisure and comfort and the luxuries of living without paying the
price of toil is a social parasite. I believe that it is an important
function of public education to impress upon each generation the highest
ideals of living as well as the arts that are essential to the making of
a livelihood, but I wish to protest against the doctrine that these two
factors stand over against o