eding generation. But even a new dress may add a touch of newness
to an old doll; and a new phrase or a new setting may, for a moment,
rejuvenate an old truth.

The topic that I wish to treat is this, "The Ideal Teacher." And I may
as well start out by saying that the ideal teacher is and always must be
a figment of the imagination. This is the essential feature of any
ideal. The ideal man, for example, must possess an infinite number of
superlative characteristics. We take this virtue from one, and that from
another, and so on indefinitely until we have constructed in imagination
a paragon, the counterpart of which could never exist on earth. He would
have all the virtues of all the heroes; but he would lack all their
defects and all their inadequacies. He would have the manners of a
Chesterfield, the courage of a Winkelried, the imagination of a Dante,
the eloquence of a Cicero, the wit of a Voltaire, the intuitions of a
Shakespeare, the magnetism of a Napoleon, the patriotism of a
Washington, the loyalty of a Bismarck, the humanity of a Lincoln, and a
hundred other qualities, each the counterpart of some superlative
quality, drawn from the historic figure that represented that quality in
richest measure.

And so it is with the ideal teacher: he would combine, in the right
proportion, all of the good qualities of all of the good teachers that
we have ever known or heard of. The ideal teacher is and always must be
a creature, not of flesh and blood, but of the imagination, a child of
the brain. And perhaps it is well that this is true; for, if he existed
in the flesh, it would not take very many of him to put the rest of us
out of business. The relentless law of compensation, which rules that
unusual growth in one direction must always be counterbalanced by
deficient growth in another direction, is the saving principle of human
society. That a man should be superlatively good in one single line of
effort is the demand of modern life. It is a platitude to say that this
is the age of the specialist. But specialism, while it always means a
gain to society, also always means a loss to the individual. Darwin, at
the age of forty, suddenly awoke to the fact that he was a man of one
idea. Twenty years before, he had been a youth of the most varied and
diverse interests. He had enjoyed music, he had found delight in the
masterpieces of imaginative literature, he had felt a keen interest in
the drama, in poetry, in the fine ar