Chapter III: Papers by Alice Freeman Palmer (4)

But with the third class of doubts the case is different. These relate to the constitution of the staff of teachers, and here sufficient facts are at hand to permit a few points to be demonstrated with considerable certainty. When, for example, we ask from what source teachers are to be drawn, we are usually told that they must come from college faculties. If the method of the extension lecturer is to be as thorough as that of the universities themselves, the lecturers must be experts, not amateurs; and where except at the colleges does a body of experts exist? No doubt many well-trained men are scattered throughout the community as merchants, doctors, school-teachers, and lawyers. But these men, when of proved power, have more than they properly can attend to in their own affairs. It seems to be the colleges, therefore, to which the movement must look for its teachers; and in the experiments thus far made in this country the extension lecturing has been done for the most part by college officers. A professor of history, political economy, or literature has, in addition to his college teaching, also given a course of instruction elsewhere. This feature of the American system, one may say with confidence, must prove a constant damage to the work of the colleges and, if persisted in, must ultimately destroy the extension scheme itself.

In England the extension teachers are not university teachers. To have no independent staff for extension work is a novelty of the American undertaking. The very name, university extension, besides being barbaric, is in its English employment largely misleading; since neither the agencies for extending nor indeed, for the most part, the studies extended, are found at the universities at all. A small syndicate or committee, appointed from among the university officers, is the only share the university has in the business. The impression, so general in this country, that English university teachers are roaming about the island, lecturing to mixed audiences, is an entire error. The university teachers stay at home and send other people, their own graduates chiefly, to instruct the multitude. A committee of them decides on the qualifications for the work of such persons as care to devote themselves to itinerant teaching as a profession. For those so selected they arrange times, places, and subjects; but they themselves do not move from their own lecture rooms. Nor is there occasion for their doing so. In the slender development of popular education in England, many more persons of the upper classes become trained as specialists than can find places as university teachers. There thus arises a learned and leisured accumulation which capitally serves the country in case of a new educational need. On this accumulated stock of cultured men--men who otherwise could not easily bring their culture to market--the extension movement draws. These men are its teachers, its permanent teachers, since there are not competing places striving to draw them away. In the two countries the educational situation is exactly reversed: in England there are more trained men than positions; in America, more positions than trained men. It seems probable too that this condition of things will continue long, so far as we are concerned; at least there is no present prospect of our reaching a limit in the demand for competent men. Whenever a college has a chair to fill, it is necessary to hunt far and wide for a suitable person to fill it. The demand is not from the old places alone. Almost every year a new college is founded. Every year the old ones grow. In twenty-five years Harvard has quadrupled its staff. Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania,--indeed almost every strong college in the country,--shows an immense advance. A Western state is no sooner settled than it establishes a state university, and each of the sects starts from one to three colleges besides. No such perpetual expansion goes on in England. The number of learned positions there is measurably fixed. If more experts than can fill them, or than care to enter political life, the liberal professions, and the civil service, are manufactured in the course of a year, the surplus stock is at the disposal of the extension syndicate. Many of these men too are persons of means, to whom a position of dignity is of more consequence than a large salary. The problem, accordingly, of organizing popular instruction out of such a body of waiting experts is a comparatively simple one; but it is not so simple here. In our country any man who has a fair acquaintance with a special subject and moderate skill in imparting it, especially if he will be contented with a small salary, can be pretty sure of college appointment.

Naturally enough, therefore, the organizers of the extension movement, despairing of finding among us competent unattached teachers, have turned at once to the colleges; but the colleges are a very unsafe support to lean upon. A professor in a university where the studies are elective has no more superfluous time than a busy lawyer, or doctor, or business man. Merely to keep up with the literature of a subject, to say nothing of that research and writing which should enlarge its limits, is an enormous task. Teaching too is no longer an affair of text-books and recitations. Leisurely days of routine ease belong to the past. A professor nowadays must prepare lectures incessantly; must perpetually revise them; must arrange examinations; direct the reading of his students; receive their theses; himself read a large part of their voluminous written work; personally oversee his advanced men; gather them about him in laboratory, seminary and conference; attend innumerable committee and faculty meetings; devise legislation for the further development of his college and department; correspond with schools and colleges where his students, after taking their higher degree, may suitably be placed; and if at the end of a hard-worked day he can find an hour's leisure, he must still keep his door open for students or fellow-officers to enter. So laborious have become the duties of a university teacher that few large staffs now go through a year without one or two of their members breaking down. With the growing complexity of work it often seems as if the proper business of college officers, study and teaching, must some day cease altogether, crowded out by the multifarious tasks with which they are only indirectly connected. It is useless to say that these things are not necessary. Whoever neglects them will cease to make his college, his subject and his influence grow. It is because professors now see that they cannot safely neglect them that the modern college differs fundamentally from its humdrum predecessor of a quarter of a century ago. Any movement which seeks to withdraw a professor's attention from these things, and induces him to put his soul elsewhere, inflicts on the community a serious damage. No amount of intellectual stimulus furnished to little companies here and there can atone for the loss that must fall on education when college teachers pledge themselves to do serious work in other places than in their own libraries and lecture rooms. To be an explorer and a guide in a department of human knowledge is an arduous profession. It admits no half-hearted service.

Of course if the work demanded elsewhere is not serious, the case is different. Rather with benefit than with damage a college teacher may on occasion recast the instruction that was intended for professionals and offer it to a popular audience. In this way a professor makes himself known and makes his college known. Many of the small colleges are now engaging in university extension as an inexpensive means of advertising themselves. But such lecturing is incidental, voluntary and perpetually liable to interruption. Beyond the immediate series of lectures it cannot be depended on. There is nothing institutional about it. The men who undertake it are owned elsewhere, and a second mortgage is not usually a very valuable piece of property. A movement which places its reliance on the casual teaching of overworked men is condemned from the start. University extension can never pass beyond the stage of amateurism and temporary expedient until, like its English namesake, it has a permanent staff of instructors exclusively devoted to its service.

Where, then, is such a staff to be obtained? In view of the conditions of education in this country already described, it is improbable that it can be obtained at all. But something may still be done,--something, however, of a more modest sort than enthusiasts at present have in mind. There issue from our great universities every year a number of men who have had two or three years' training beyond their bachelor's degree. Some of them have had a year or two of foreign study. They frequently wish to teach. Places do not immediately open to them. If the extension movement would set them to work, it might have all their time at a moderate salary for two or three years. Such men, it is true, would be inexperienced, and their connection with itinerant teaching could not be rendered lasting. As soon as one of them proved his power as a teacher, some college would call him; and he would seldom prefer the nomadic and fragmentary life to an established one. Plainly too under the charge of such men the grade of instruction could not be the highest; but it might be sound, inspiriting even, and it is in any case all that present circumstances render possible. We may mourn that those who are masters in their several provinces are already fully employed. We may wish there were a multitude of masters sitting about, ready for enlistment in a missionary undertaking. But there are no such masters. The facts are evident enough; and if the extension movement aims at a durable existence, it will respect these facts. The men it wants it cannot have without damaging them; and damaging them, it damages the higher education of which they are the guardians. Teachers of a lower grade are at hand, ready to be experimented with. The few experiments already tried have been fairly successful. Let the extension leaders give up all thought of doing here what has been done in England. The principal part of that work is performed for us by other means. The wisest guidance, accordingly, may not lead the movement to any long success. If, however, university extension will keep itself clearly detached from other educational agencies and make a quiet offer of humble yet serviceable instruction, there is a fair prospect that by somewhat slow degrees a permanent new power may be added to the appliances for rendering busy Americans intelligent.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Printed in 1892.

VI

SPECIALIZATION[2]

Ladies and gentlemen of the graduating class, this afternoon belongs to you. This morning we dedicated a chime of bells to the memory of Mrs. Palmer, and in those moving exercises you had but a slender share. Probably not half a dozen of you ever saw her who, once seen, was loved with romantic ardor. Undoubtedly many of you are different from what you would have been had she not lived, and lived here; for her influence so passed into the structure of this University that she will shape successive generations of you for a long time to come. But enough of her. Let us dismiss her from our thoughts. Too much praise we have already lavished on one who was ever simple and self-forgetting. She would chide our profusion. If we would think as she would wish us to think, let us turn rather to the common matters of the day, reflecting on those joys and perplexities which have attended you throughout these formative years. One especially among these perplexities, perhaps the greatest of all, I would invite you to consider now. Let me set it clearly before you.

This morning I sat down to breakfast with about a hundred of you who had entered on the attainment of the highest degree which this University offers. You were advanced specialists. You had each chosen some single line of endeavor. But even then I remembered that you were not the only specialists here. Before me this afternoon I see candidates in medicine, men and women who have taken for their specialty the warfare with pain and disease. They have said, "All that I can ever know, I will bring to bear on this urgent problem." Here also are the lawyers, impassioned for justice, for the quelling of human strife. That is their specialty. They too restrict themselves to a single point of view. Beside them sit the scientific men, who looking over the vast expanse of nature have accepted the task of tracing the physical aspects of this marvellous machine. Nor can I stop here. Throughout the undergraduate department, as we all know, run dominant interests. I should be ashamed of a young man who in his four years had not found some compulsive interest; for it is only when an interest compels that we can say that education has begun. So long as we are simply learning what is set before us, taking the routine mass of academic subjects, we may be faithful students, but we are not scholars. No, it is when with a free heart we give ourselves to a subject, bidding it take of us all it demands and feeling that we had rather attend to it than to anything else, because it expresses our personal desires--then it is that its quickening influence takes hold. But this is specialization. We might think of the University of Chicago then as a great specializing machine.

But why has each of you set himself this task of specialization? Because the world needs leaders, and you have chosen yourselves to be those leaders. Are you aware how exceptional is your condition? The last census shows that at present hardly one per cent of our population is in our colleges. You are of that one per cent, and you are here in order that you may enlighten the other ninety-nine per cent. If through ignorance you fail, you will cause others to fail and you had better never have come to this University. To some sort of leadership you have dedicated yourselves, and to this aim you should be true. But do not at times doubts cross your mind? Have you not occasionally asked yourselves whether you can attain such leadership and make the most of your lives by shutting yourselves up to a specialty? Multitudes of interesting things are calling; shall you turn away from them and follow a single line? It will be worth while to-day to consider these fundamental questions and inquire how far we are justified in specializing, what dangers there are in it, and in what degree those dangers may be avoided.

Let me say, then, at the start, that I regard specialization as absolutely essential to scholarship. There is no scholarship without it, for it is involved in the very process of knowing. When I look at this desk I am specializing; that is, I am detaching this piece of furniture from all else in the room. I am limiting myself, and I cannot see without it. I can gaze without specialization, but I cannot see without specialization. If I am to know anything by sight, that knowledge must come through the limitation of sight. I seize this object, cast away all others, and thus fix my attention. Or if I am carefully to observe, I even put my eye on a single point of the desk. There is no other way. Clear knowledge becomes possible only through precise observation. Now specialization is nothing but this necessary limitation of attention; and we, as specialists, are merely carrying out on a large scale what every human being must practise in some degree whenever he knows. We employ the process persistently, and for the sake of science are willing to hold ourselves steadily to a single line of observation. And we cannot do otherwise. The principles involved in the specialization of the senses run throughout all science. If we would know, we must hold the attention long on a given subject.

But there is an unfortunate side to specialization. It obliges us to discard other important interests. To discard merely unimportant ones is easy. But every evening when I sit down to devote myself to my ethics I am aware that there are persons starving in Boston who might be saved if I should drop my work and go to them. Yet I sit calmly there and say, "Let them starve; I am going to study ethics." I do not see how I could be a suitable professor of ethics unless I were willing thus to limit myself. That is the hard part, as I understand it, of specialization,--the cutting off of things that are worth while. I am sure you have already found it out. Many of you have come from places of narrow opportunity and here find a welcome abundance. Remembering how you have longed to obtain such privileges, you will be tempted to scatter yourselves over a wide field, gathering a little here and a little there. At the end of the year you will have nothing, if you do that. The only possibility of gain is to choose your field, devote serious time to it, count yourself a specialist, and propose to live like one. Goethe admirably announces the principle: "Wer grosses will muss sich beschraenken koennen." You must accept limitations if you will go on to power, for in limitation the very process of knowledge is rooted.

Furthermore, not only is specialization forced upon us by the nature of knowledge, but without it our own powers cannot receive appropriate discipline. It is difficult business to fashion a sound observer. Each province of science has its special modes of observation, its own modes of reasoning even. So long as we are unfamiliar with these and obliged to hold ourselves to them through conscious control, our work is poor. It is slow, inaccurate, and exhausting. Only when we have trained ourselves to such aptitudes that within a certain field our observations and reasonings are instinctive do we become swift, sure, and unfatigued in research. To train our powers then we must begin to specialize early and hold ourselves steadily within bounds. As one looks over the names of those who have accomplished much, one is surprised at the number who were early specialists. Take my own department: Berkeley writes his great work when he is twenty-five; Hume publishes his masterpiece at twenty-seven. Or again, Keats had brought his wonderful results to accomplishment and died at twenty-five; Shelley at thirty; Marlowe, the greatest loss English letters ever met, at twenty-seven. It is just the same in other fields: Alexander dies at thirty-six, Jesus at thirty-three. Yes, let us look nearer home: the most forcible leader American education has ever had became president of Harvard University at thirty-five; President Hyde of Bowdoin took his position at twenty-seven; my own wife, Alice Freeman, was president of Wellesley at twenty-six. These are early specialists; and because they specialized early they acquired an aptitude, a smoothness of work, a precision of insight, and width of power which could not have been theirs had they begun later. I would not deny that there have been geniuses who seemed to begin late: Kant was such; Locke was such. You will recall many within your own fields. But I think when you search the career of those who come to power in comparatively late years, you will find that there has usually been a train of covert specialization running through their lives. They may not have definitely named their field to themselves, or produced work within that field in early years, but everything had been converging toward that issue. I believe, therefore, you ought to respect your specialty, because only through it can your powers be brought to their highest accuracy and service.

One more justification of specialization I will briefly mention, that it is necessary for the organization of society. No motive is good for much until it is socialized. If specialization only developed our individual selves, we could hardly justify it; but it is the means of progress for society. The field of knowledge is vast; no man can master it, and its immensity was never so fully understood as to-day. The only way the whole province can be conquered and brought under subjection to human needs is by parting it out, one man being content to till his little corner while his neighbor is engaged on something widely different. We must part out the field of knowledge and specialize on our allotted work, in order that there may be entirety in science. If we seek to have entirety in ourselves, science will be fragmentary and feeble. That division of labor which has proved efficient everywhere else is no less needful in science.

But I suppose it is hardly necessary to justify specialization to this audience. Most of you have staked heavily on it, putting yourselves to serious inconvenience, many of you heavily mortgaging your future, in order to come here and devote yourselves to some single interest. I might confidently go through this room asking each of you what is your subject? And you would proudly reply, "My subject is this. My subject is this. My subject is this." I think you would feel ashamed if you had not thus specialized. I see no occasion, therefore, to elaborate what I have urged. As I understand it, the three roots of specialization are these: it is grounded in the very nature of the knowing process; it is grounded in the needs of ourselves as individuals, in order that we may attain our maximum efficiency; it is grounded in the needs of society, because only so can society reach that fulness of knowledge which its progress requires.

But, after all, the beliefs which are accepted as matters of course in this room are largely denounced outside it. We must acknowledge that our confidence in specialization encounters many doubts in the community. It may be well, then, to place ourselves where that community stands and ask the general public to tell us why it doubts us, what there is in our specialized attitude which it thinks defective, and what are the complaints which it is disposed to bring against us? I will try to take the position of devil's advocate and plead the cause of the objector to specialization.

Specialization, it is said, leads to ignorance; indeed it rather aims at ignorance than knowledge. When I attend to this desk, it is true I secure a bit of knowledge, but how small is that bit in comparison to all the things in this room which I might know about! It is but a fraction. Yet I have condemned all else in the room to ignorance, reserving only this one little object for knowledge. Now that is what we are all of us doing on a great scale; by specializing, by limiting our attention, we cut off what is not attended to. It is often assumed that attention is mainly a positive affair and occupied with what we are to know. But that is a very small portion of it; really its important part is the negative, the removal of what we do not wish to observe. We cut ourselves off from the great mass of knowledge which is offered. Is it not then true that every specialist has disciplined himself to be an ignoramus? He has drawn a fence around a little portion of the universe and said, "Within that fence I know something." "Yes," the public replies, "but you do not know anything outside." And is not the public right? When we step forward and claim to be learned men, is not the public justified in saying, "I know a great deal more than you do; I know a thousand things and you know only one. You say you know that one through and through, and of course I do not know my thousand things through and through. But it is not necessary. I perceive their relations; I can handle them; I can use them in practice; can you?" "Well, no," we are obliged to say, "we specialists are a little fumbling when we try to take hold of the world. We are not altogether skilful in action, just because we are such specialists." You students here have been devoting yourselves to some one point--I am afraid many of you are going to have sad experience of it--you have been learning to know something nobody else on earth does know, and then you go forth to seek a position. But the world may have no use for you; there are only two or three positions of that sort in the country, and those may happen to be filled. Just because you are such an elaborate scholar you cannot earn your daily bread. You have cut yourself off from everything but that one species of learning, and that does not happen to be wanted. Therefore you are not wanted. Such is the too frequent condition of the specialist. The thousand things he does not know; it is only the one thing he does know. And because he is so ignorant, he is helpless.

Turning then to our second justification of specialization, the case seems equally bad. I said that specialization was needed for the training of our powers. The training of them all? Not that, but the training of only certain ones among them. The others hang slack. In those regions of ourselves we count for little. We are men of weight only within the range of the powers we have trained; and what a large slice of us lies outside these! Accordingly the general public declares that there is no judgment so bad as the judgment of a specialist. Few practical situations exactly coincide with his specialty, and outside his specialty his judgment is worse than that of the novice. He has been training himself in reference to something precise; and the moment he ventures beyond it, the very exactitude of his discipline limits his worth. The man who has not been a specialist, who has dabbled in all things and has acquired a rough and ready common sense, that man's judgment is worth something in many different sections of life, but the judgment of the specialist is painfully poor beyond his usual range. You remember how, in the comic opera, the practice is satirized of appointing a person who has never been at sea to take charge of the navy of a great country. But that is the only sensible course to pursue. Put a specialist there, and the navy will be wretchedly organized, because the administration of the navy requires something more than the specialism of seamanship. It is necessary to coordinate seamanship with many other considerations, and the man trained in the specialty of seamanship is little likely to have that ability. Therefore ordinarily we use our experts best by putting them under the control of those who are not experts. Common sense has the last word. The coordinating power which has not been disciplined in single lines is what ultimately takes the direction of affairs. We need the specialist within his little field; shut him up there, and he is valuable enough; but don't let him escape. That seems to be the view of the public. They keep the specialist confined because they utterly distrust his judgment when he extends himself abroad.

And when we look at the third of our grounds for justification, social need, the public declares that the specialists are intolerably presumptuous. Knowing their own subject, they imagine they can dictate to anybody and do not understand how limited is their importance. Again and again it happens that because a man does know some one thing pretty well he sets himself up as a great man in general. My own province suffers in this respect more than most; for as soon as a man acquires considerable skill in chemistry or biology, he is apt to issue a pronunciamento on philosophy. But philosophy does not suffer alone. Everywhere the friends of the great specialist are telling him he has proved himself a mighty man, quite competent to sit in judgment on the universe; and he, forgetting that the universe and the particular subject he knows something about are two different things, really imagines that his ignorant opinions deserve consideration.

Now I suppose we must acknowledge that in all this blasphemy against our calling, there is a good deal of truth. These certainly are dangers which all of us specialists incur. I agree that they are inevitable dangers. Do not, however, let us on account of them abandon specialization and seek to acquire a mass of miscellaneous information. Bacon said, "I take all knowledge for my province." If we say it, we shall become not Bacons but fools. No, that is the broad road to ignorance. But laying these profound dangers of specialization well to heart, assured that they beset us all, let us search for remedial measures. Let us ask how such dangers may be reduced to a minimum. Is there a certain way in which we may engage in the specialist's research and still save ourselves from some of the evils I have here depicted? I think there is. To find it we will follow the same three avenues which have been leading us thus far.

In regard to the first, the limitation of attention, I understand that, after all, our specialty cannot fill our entire life. We do sometimes sit down to dinner; we occasionally talk with a friend; we now and then take a journey; we permit ourselves from time to time to read some other book than one which refers to our subject. That is, I take it, if we are fully alive to the great danger that in specializing we are cutting off a large part of the universe, we shall be wise in gathering eagerly whatever additional knowledge we may acquire outside our specialty. And I must say that the larger number of eminent specialists whom I have happened to know have been men pretty rich in knowledge outside their specialties. They were men who well apprehended the extreme danger of their limited modes of pursuit and who greedily grasped, therefore, at every bit of knowledge they could obtain which lay beyond their province. They appropriated all the wisdom they could; and merely because it did not exactly fit in with their specialty, they did not turn it away. I do not know how far it is wise to go in this effort to repair the one-sidedness in which most of us are compelled to live. A rather extreme case was once brought to my attention. There was a student at Harvard who had been a high scholar with me, and I found that he was also so specializing in the classics that when he graduated he took classical honors. Some years later I learned that he was one of the highest scholars in the Medical School. Meeting him a few years after he had entered his profession, I asked, "How did it happen that you changed your mind so markedly? You devoted yourself to classics and philosophy in college. What made you finally decide to become a physician?" "Finally decide!" said he. "Why, from childhood up I never intended to be anything else." "But," I persisted, "I cannot be mistaken in recalling that you devoted yourself in college to classics and philosophy." "Yes," he said, "I did, because I knew I should never have another chance at those subjects. I was going to give the rest of my life to medicine, so I took those years for classics and philosophy." I asked, "Wasn't that a great mistake; haven't you now found out your blunder?" "Oh, no," said he, "I am a much better physician on that account; I could not have done half so well if I hadn't had all that training in philosophy and classics." Now I cannot advise such a course for everybody. It takes a big man to do that. If you are big enough, it is worth while laying a very broad foundation; but considering the size on which most of us are planned, it is wiser to begin early and specialize from the very start.

Well, then, here is one mode of making up for the defects of specialization: we may pick up knowledge outside our subject. But it is an imperfect mode; you never can put away your limitations altogether. You can do a great deal. Use your odd quarter-hours wisely and do not merely play in fragmentary times, understanding that these are precious seasons for acquiring the knowledge which lies beyond your province. Then every time you talk with anybody, lead him neatly to what he knows best, keeping an attentive ear, becoming a first-class listener, and seeking to get beyond yourself. By doing so you will undoubtedly much enlarge the narrow bounds to which you have pledged yourself. Yet this policy will not be enough. It will require to be supplemented by something more. Therefore I should say in the second place, that in disciplining our powers we must be careful to conceive our specialty broadly enough. In taking it too narrowly lies our chief danger. There are two types of specialist. There is the man who regards his specialty as a door into which he goes and by which he shuts the world out, hiding himself with his own little interests. That is the petty, poor specialist, the specialist who never becomes a man of power, however much he may be a man of learning. But there is an entirely different sort of specialist from that; it is the man who regards his specialty as a window out of which he may peer upon all the world. His specialty is merely a point of view from which everything is regarded. Consequently without departing from our specialty each of us may escape narrowness. Instead of running over all the earth and contemplating it in a multitude of different aspects, the wise specialist chooses some single point of view and examines the universe as it is related to this. Everything therefore has a meaning for him, everything contributes something to his specialty. Narrowing himself while he is getting his powers disciplined, as those powers become trained he slacks them off and gives them a wider range; for he knows very well that while the world is cut up into little parcels it never can be viewed rightly. It will always be distorted. For, after all, things are what they are through their relations, and if you snap those relations you never truly conceive anything. Accordingly, as soon as we have got our specialty, we should begin to coordinate that specialty with everything else. At first we may fix our attention on some single problem within a given field, but soon we discover that we cannot master that problem without knowing the rest of the field also. As we go on to know the rest of the field and make ourself a fair master of that science, we discover that that science depends on other sciences. Never was there an age of the world in which this interlocking of the sciences was so clearly perceived as in our day. Formerly we seemed able to isolate a particular topic and know something of it, but in our evolutionary time nothing of that kind is possible. Each thing is an epitome of the whole. Have you been training your eye to see a world in a grain of sand? Can you look through your specialty out upon the total universe and say: "I am a specialist merely because I do not want to be a narrow man. My specialty is my telescope. Everything belongs to me. I cannot, it is true, turn to it all at once. Being a feeble person I must advance from point to point, accepting limitations; but just as fast as I can, having mastered those limitations, I shall cast them aside and press on into ever broader regions."

But I said specialization was fundamentally justified through the organization of society, because by its division of toil we contribute our share to the total of human knowledge; and yet the popular objector declares that we are presumptuous, and because we have mastered our own specialty we are apt to assume ourselves capable of pronouncing judgment over the whole field. Undoubtedly there is this danger; but such a result is not inevitable. The danger is one which we are perfectly capable of setting aside. The temper of our mind decides the matter, and this is entirely within our control. What is the use of our going forth presumptuous persons? We certainly shall be unserviceable if we are persons of that type. That is not the type of Charles Darwin in biology, of William James in psychology, of Horace Howard Furness in Shakespeare criticism, of Albert Michelson in physics. These are men as remarkable for modesty and simplicity as for scholarly insight. The true characteristic of a learned specialist is humility. What we want to be training ourselves in is respect for other people and a sense of solidarity with them. Our work would be of little use if there were not somebody at our side who cared nothing for that work of ours and cared immensely for his own. It is our business to respect that other man, whether he respects us or not. We must learn to look upon every specialist as a fellow worker. Without him we cannot be perfect. Let us make ourselves as large as possible, in order that we may contribute our little something to that to which all others are contributing. It is this cooperative spirit which it should be ours to acquire. And it seems to me that you are under peculiarly fortunate circumstances for acquiring it. What strikes me as fatal is to have a group of young specialists taken and trained by themselves, detachedly, shut off from others. Nothing of that sort occurs here. Every day you are rubbing shoulders with persons who have other interests than yours. When you walk to dinner, you fall in with a comrade who has been spending his day over something widely unlike that which has concerned you. Possibly you have been able to lead him to talk about it; possibly you have gained an insight into what he was seeking, and seen how his work largely supplements your own. If you have had proper respect for him and proper humility in regard to yourself, this great society of specialists has filled out your work for you day after day; and in that sense of cooperation, of losing yourselves in the common service of scientific mankind, you have found the veritable glory of these happy years.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] On the morning of June 9, 1908, a chime of bells was dedicated at
the University of Chicago in honor of Alice Freeman Palmer. At
the Convocation Exercises in the afternoon the following address
was delivered.

VII

THE GLORY OF THE IMPERFECT[3]

A few years ago Matthew Arnold, after travelling in this country and revising the somewhat unfavorable opinion of us which he had formed earlier and at a distance, still wrote in his last paper on Civilization in the United States that America, in spite of its excellences, is an uninteresting land. He thought our institutions remarkable. He pointed out how close a fit exists between them and the character of the citizens, a fit so close as is hardly to be found in other countries. He saw much that is of promise in our future. But after all, he declares that no man will live here if he can live elsewhere, because America is an uninteresting land.

This remark of Mr. Arnold's is one which we may well ponder. As I consider how many of you are preparing to go forth from college and establish yourselves in this country, I ask myself whether you must find your days uninteresting. You certainly have not been finding them uninteresting here. Where were college days ever dull? It is a beautiful circumstance that, the world over, the period of education is the period of romance. No such thing was ever heard of as a college student who did not enjoy himself, a college student who was not full of hope. And if this has been the case with us prosaic males of the past, what must be the experience of your own hopeful sex? I am sure you are looking forward with eagerness to your intended work. Is it to be blighted? Are you to find life dull? It might seem from the remark of Mr. Arnold that it would probably be so, for you must live in an uninteresting land.

When this remark of Mr. Arnold's was first made a multitude of voices in all parts of our country declared that Mr. Arnold did not know what he was talking about. As a stupid Englishman he had come here and had failed to see what our land contains. In reality every corner of it is stuffed with that beauty and distinction which he denied. For that was the offensive feature of his statement: he had said in substance the chief sources of interest are beauty and distinction. America is not beautiful. Its scenery, its people, its past, are not distinguished. It is impossible, therefore, for an intelligent and cultivated man to find permanent interests here.

The ordinary reply to these unpleasant sayings was, "America is beautiful, America is distinguished." But on the face of the matter this reply might well be distrusted. Mr. Arnold is not a man likely to make such a mistake. He is a trained observer. His life has been passed in criticism, and criticism of an extremely delicate sort. It seems to me it must be rather his standards than his facts which are at fault. Many of us would be slow to believe our teacher had made an error in observation; for to many of us he has been a very great teacher indeed. Through him we have learned the charm of simplicity, the refinement of exactitude, the strength of finished form; we have learned calmness in trial too, the patience of duty, ability to wait when in doubt; in short, we have learned dignity, and he who teaches us dignity is not a man lightly to be forgotten or disparaged. I say, therefore, that this answer to Mr. Arnold, that he was in error, is one which on its face might prudently be distrusted.

But for other than prudential reasons I incline to agree with Mr. Arnold's opinion. Even though I were not naturally disposed to credit his judgment, I should be obliged to acknowledge that my own observations largely coincide with his. In Europe I think I find beauty more abundant than in America. Certainly the distinguished objects, the distinguished persons, whom I go there to see, are more numerous than those I might by searching find here. I cannot think this portion of Mr. Arnold's statement can be impugned. And must we then accept his conclusion and agree that your lives, while sheltered in this interesting college, are themselves interesting; but that when you go forth the romance is to pass away? I do not believe it, because I question the standard which Mr. Arnold employs. He tells us that the sources of the interesting are beauty and distinction. I doubt it. However much delight and refreshment these may contribute to our lives, I do not believe they predominantly constitute our interests.

Evidently Mr. Arnold cannot have reached his opinion through observation, for the commonest facts of experience confute him. There is in every community a certain class of persons whose business it is to discover what people regard as interesting. These are the newspaper editors; they are paid to find out for us interesting matters every day. There is nothing they like better than to get hold of something interesting which has not been observed before. Are they then searchers for beauty and distinction? I should say not. Here are the subjects which these seekers after interesting things discussed in my morning paper. There is an account of disturbances in South America. There is a statement about Mr. Blaine's health. There is a report of a prize fight. There are speculations about the next general election. There is a description of a fashionable wedding. These things interest me, and I suspect they interest the majority of the readers of that paper; though they can hardly be called beautiful or distinguished. Obviously, therefore, if Mr. Arnold had inspected the actual interests of to-day, he would have been obliged to recognize some other basis for them than beauty and distinction.

Yet I suppose all will feel it would be better if the trivial matters which excite our interest in the morning journal were of a more beautiful, of a more distinguished sort. Our interests would be more honorable then. These things interest merely because they are facts, not because they are beautiful. A fact is interesting through being a fact, and this commonest and most basal of interests Mr. Arnold has overlooked. He has not perceived that life itself is its own unceasing interest.

Before we can decide, however, whether he has overlooked anything more, we must determine what is meant by beauty. Let us analyze the matter a little. Let us see if we can detect why the beautiful and the distinguished are interesting, and still how we can provide a place for the other interests which are omitted in his statement. If we should look at a tree and ask ourselves why this tree is more beautiful than another, we should probably find we had thought it so on some such grounds as these: the total bunch of branches and leaves, that exquisite green mass sunning itself, is no larger than can well be supported on the brown trunk. It is large enough; there is nothing lacking. If it were smaller, the office of the trunk would hardly be fulfilled. If larger, the trunk would be overpowered. Those branches which extend themselves to the right adequately balance those which are extended to the left. Scrutinizing it, we find every leaf in order, each one ready to aerate its little sap and so conduce to the life of the whole. There is no decay, no broken branch. Nothing is deficient, but at the same time there is nothing superfluous. Each part ministers to every part. In all parts the tree is proportionate--beautiful, intrinsically beautiful, because it is unsuperfluous, unlacking.

And when we turn to other larger, more intricately beautiful objects, we find the same principle involved. Fulness of relations among the parts, perfection of organism, absence of incongruity, constitute the beauty of the object. Were you ever in Wiltshire in England, and did you visit the splendid seat of the Earls of Pembroke, Wilton House? It is a magnificent pile, designed by Holbein the painter, erected before Elizabeth began to reign. Its green lawns, prepared ages ago, were adapted to their positions originally and perform their ancient offices to-day. Time has changed its gardens only by making them more lovely than when they were planned. So harmonious with one another are grounds and castle that, looking on the stately dwelling, one imagines that the Creator himself must have had it in mind in his design of the spot. And when you enter, all is equally congruous. Around the central court runs the cloistered statuary gallery, out of which open the several halls. Passing through these, you notice the portraits not only of past members of the family--men who have been among the most distinguished of England's worthies--but also portraits of the eminent friends of the Pembrokes, painted by notable artists who were often themselves also friends of the family. In the library is shown Sidney's "Arcadia," written in this very garden, with a lock of Elizabeth's hair inclosed. In the chief hall a play of Shakespeare's is reported to have been performed by his company. Half a dozen names that shine in literature lend intellectual glory to the place. But as you walk from room to room, amazed at the accumulation of wealth and proud tradition, you perceive how each casual object makes its separate contribution to the general impression of stateliness. A glance from a window discloses an enchanting view: in the distance, past the cedars, rises the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, one of the most peaceful and aspiring in England. All parts--scenery, buildings, rich possessions, historic heritages--minister to parts. Romantic imagination is stirred. It is beautiful, beautiful beyond anything America can show.

And if we turn to that region where beauty is most subtly embodied, if we turn to human character, we find the conditions not dissimilar. The character which impresses us most is that which has fully organized its powers, so that every ability finds its appropriate place without prominence; one with no false humility and without self-assertion; a character which cannot be overthrown by petty circumstance, but, steadfast in itself, no part lacking, no part superfluous, easily lets its ample functions assist one another in all that they are summoned to perform. When we behold a man like this, we say, "This is what I would be. Here is the goal toward which I would tend. This man, like Wilton House, like the beautiful tree, is a finished thing." It is true when we turn our attention back and once more criticise, we see that it is not so. No human character can be finished. It is its glory that it cannot be. It must ever press forward; each step reached is but the vantage-ground for a further step. There is no completeness in human character--in human character save one.

And must we then consider human character uninteresting? According to Mr. Arnold's standard perhaps we ought to do so. But through this very case the narrowness of that standard becomes apparent. Mr. Arnold rightly perceives that beauty is one of our higher interests. It certainly is not our only or our highest, because in that which is most profoundly interesting, human life, the completeness of parts which constitutes beauty is never reached. There must obviously be another and a higher source of interest, one too exalted to be found where awhile ago I sketched it, in the mere occurrence of a fact. We cannot say that all events, simply because they occur, are alike interesting. To find in them an intelligent interest we must rate their worth. I agree, accordingly, with Mr. Arnold in thinking that it is the passion for perfection, the assessment of worths, which is at the root of all enduring interests. But I believe that in the history of the world this passion for perfection, this deepest root of human interests, has presented itself in two forms. The Greek conceived it in one way, the Christian has conceived it in another.

It was the office of that astonishing people, the Greeks, to teach us to honor completeness, the majesty of the rounded whole. We see this in every department of their marvellous life. Whenever we look at a Greek statue, it seems impossible that it should be otherwise without loss; we cannot imagine any portion changed; the thing has reached its completeness. Before it we can only bow and feel at rest. Just so it is when we examine Greek architecture. There too we find the same ordered proportion, the same adjustment of part to part. And if we turn to Greek literature, the stately symmetry is no less remarkable. What page of Sophocles could be stricken out? What page--what sentence? Just enough, not more than enough! The thought has grown, has asserted its entirety; and when that entirety has been reached, it has stopped, delighted with its own perfection. A splendid ideal, an ideal which never can fail, I am sure, to interest man so long as he remains intelligent!

And yet this beautiful Greek work shows only one aspect of the world. It omitted something, it omitted formative life. Joy in birth, delight in beginnings, interest in origins,--these things did not belong to the Greek; they came in with Christianity. It is Jesus Christ who turns our attention toward growth, and so teaches us to delight in the imperfect rather than in the perfect. It is he who, wishing to give to his disciples a model of what they should be, does not select the completed man, but takes the little child and sets him before them and to the supercilious says, "Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones." He teaches us to reverence the beginning of things. And at first thought it might well seem that this reverence for the imperfect was a retrogression. What! is not a consummate man more admirable than a child? "No," Jesus answered; and because he answered so, pity was born. Before the coming of Jesus Christ, I think we may say that the sick, the afflicted, the child--shall I not say the woman?--were but slightly understood. It is because God has come down from heaven, manifesting even himself in forms of imperfection, it is on this account that our intellectual horizon has been enlarged. We may now delight in the lowly, we may stoop and gather imperfect things and rejoice in them,--rejoice beyond the old Greek rejoicing.