the clock. The hours are all too short for the work that you would do.
You are as light-hearted and as happy as a child,--for you have lost
yourself to find yourself, and you have found yourself to lose yourself.

V

And the final vow that I would have these graduates take is the vow of
idealism,--the pledge of fidelity and devotion to certain fundamental
principles of life which it is the business of education carefully to
cherish and nourish and transmit untarnished to each succeeding
generation. These but formulate in another way what the vows that I have
already discussed mean by implication. One is the ideal of social
service, upon which education must, in the last analysis, rest its case.
The second is the ideal of science,--the pledge of devotion to that
persistent unwearying search after truth, of loyalty to the great
principles of unbiased observation and unprejudiced experiment, of
willingness to accept the truth and be governed by it, no matter how
disagreeable it may be, no matter how roughly it may trample down our
pet doctrines and our preconceived theories. The nineteenth century left
us a glorious heritage in the great discoveries and inventions that
science has established. These must not be lost to posterity; but far
better lose them than lose the spirit of free inquiry, the spirit of
untrammeled investigation, the noble devotion to truth for its own sake
that made these discoveries and inventions possible.

It is these ideals that education must perpetuate, and if education is
successfully to perpetuate them, the teacher must himself be filled with
a spirit of devotion to the things that they represent. Science has
triumphed over superstition and fraud and error. It is the teacher's
duty to see to it that this triumph is permanent, that mankind does not
again fall back into the black pit of ignorance and superstition.

And so it is the teacher's province to hold aloft the torch, to stand
against the materialistic tendencies that would reduce all human
standards to the common denominator of the dollar, to insist at all
times and at all places that this nation of ours was founded upon
idealism, and that, whatever may be the prevailing tendencies of the
time, its children shall still learn to live "among the sunlit peaks."
And if the teacher is imbued with this idealism, although his work may
take him very close to Mother Earth, he may still lift his head above
the fog and look the morning sun