Huxley and education; address at the opening of the college year, Columbia university, September 28, 1910

; FAIRFIELD OSBORN

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University of

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Irvine

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HUXLEY
AND EDUCATION

ADDRESS AT

THE OPENING OF THE COLLEGE YEAR

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

SEPTEMBER 28, 1910

BY

HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN

LL.D., HON. D.Sc., CAMB.
DA COSTA PROFESSOR OF ZOOLOGY

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1910

Copyright, 1910
By HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN

THE DE VINNE PRE-33

HUXLEY AND EDUCATION

"The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave comes to the sea ;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high
Can keep my own away from me."

— BURROUGHS.

^ I ^HE most sanguine day of the
-•• college year is the opening one :
the student has not yet faced the im-
possible task annually presented of
embracing the modern world of
knowledge ; his errors and failures of
earlier years are forgotten ; he faces
the coming months full of new hope.
How would my old master, Hux-
ley, address you if he were to find
you in this felicitous frame of mind,
sharpening your wits and your pen-
cils for the contest which will begin
to-morrow morning in every hall and
5

HUXLEY

laboratory of this great University ?
May I speak for him as I heard him
during the winter of 1879—80 from
his lecture desk and as he kindly in
conversation gave me of his stores of
wisdom and experience ? May I add
from his truly brilliant essays entitled
" Science and Education," delivered
between 1874 and 1887? May I
contribute also from my own thirty-
seven years of life as a student and
teacher, beginning in 1873 and reach-
ing a turning point in 1910 when
Columbia enrolled me among its re-
search professors? It was Huxley's
life, his example, the tone of his
writings, rather than his actual pre-
cepts which most influenced me, for
in 1879 he was so intensely absorbed
in public work and administration, as
well as in research and teaching, that
little opportunity remained for lab-
6

AND EDUCATION

oratory conferences with his students.
How I happened to go to him was
as follows :

Unlucky — as they appeared to me
at the time, but lucky as I look back
upon them — were my own early
flounderings and blunderings in seek-
ing the true method of education.
Huxley has observed of his " Voy-
age of the Rattlesnake " that it is a
good thing to get down to the bare
bones of existence. The same is true
of self-education. As compared with
the hosts of to-day, few men in 1 877
knew how to guide the graduate
youth ; the Johns Hopkins was still
nascent; the creative force of Louis
Agassiz had spent itself in producing
the first school of naturalists, includ-
ing the genius, William James. One
learnt one's errors through falling
into pitfalls. With two companions
7

HUXLEY

I was guided by a sort of blind in-
stinct to feel that the most important
thing in life was to make a discovery
of some kind. On consulting one of
our most forceful and genial profess-
ors his advice was negative and dis-
couraging: "Young men," he said,
"go on with your studies for ten
or twelve years until you have cov-
ered the whole subject; you will
then be ready for research of your
own." There appeared to be some-
thing wrong about this, although we
did not know exactly what. We dis-
regarded the advice, left the labora-
tory of this professor, and at the end
of the year did succeed in writing
a paper which subsequently attracted
the attention of Huxley and was the
indirect means of an introduction to
Darwin. It was a lame product, but
it was ours, and in looking back upon

8

AND EDUCATION

it, one feels with Touchstone in his
comment upon Audrey :

"A poor virgin, Sir,
An ill favored thing, Sir,
But mine own."

I shall present in this brief address
only one idea, namely, the lesson of
Huxley's life and the result of my own
experience is that productive thinking
is the chief means as well as the chief
end of education, and that the natural
evolution of education will be to de-
velop this kind of thinking earlier and
earlier in the life of the student.

One of the most marvelous of the
manifold laws of evolution is what is
called ' acceleration' By this law the
beginning of an important organ like
the eye of the chick, for example, is
thrust forward into a very early stage
9

HUXLEY

of embryonic development. This is,
first, because the eye is a very com-
plex organ and needs a long time for
development, and second because the
fully formed eye of most animals is
needed immediately at birth. I pre-
dict that the analogy in the evolution
of education will be very close. Pro-
ductive thinking may be compared to
the eye; it is needed by the student
the moment he graduates, or is
hatched, so to speak; it is now devel-
oped only in the graduate schools. It
is such an integral and essential part
of education that the spirit of it is
destined to be * accelerated,' or thrust
forward into the opening and prepara-
tory years.

If the lines of one's life were to be
cast afresh, if by some metempsy-
chosis one were moulded into what is
known as a "great educator," a man

AND EDUCATION

of conventions and platforms, and were
suddenly to become more or less re-
sponsible for 3,000 minds and souls,
productive thinking, or the "cen-
trifugal method" of teaching, would
not be postponed to graduation or
thereafter, but would begin with the
Freshman, yes, among these humble
men of low estate! It may be apropos
to recall a story told of President
McCosh of Princeton, a man who in-
spired all his students to production
and enlivened them with a constant
flow of humor. On one occasion he
invited his predecessor, ex-President
McLean, to offer prayers in the Col-
lege Chapel. Dr. McLean's prayer
was at once all embracing and remin-
iscent ; it descended from the foreign
powers to the heads of the United
States government, to the State of
New Jersey, through the Trustees,

HUXLEY

the Faculty, and, in a perfectly logi-
cal manner, finally reached the enter-
ing class. This naturally raised a
great disturbance among the Sopho-
mores, who were evidently jealous of
the divine blessing. The disturbance
brought the prayer to an abrupt close,
and Dr. McCosh was heard to re-
mark: " I should think that Dr. Mc-
Lean would have more sense than to
pray for the Freshmen."

As regards the raw material into
which 'productive thinking' is to be
instilled, I am an optimist. I do not
belong to the 'despair school' of ed-
ucators, and have no sympathy with
the army of editorial writers and prigs
who are depreciating the American
student. The chief trouble lies not
with our youth, nor with our schools,
but with our adults. How can springs
rise higher than their sources? On the

12

AND EDUCATION

whole, you students are very much
above the average American. You
are not driven to these doors ; cer-
tainly in these days of youthful
freedom and choice you came of
your own free will. The very fact
of your coming raises you above the
general level, and while you are here
you will be living in a world of ideas,
— the only kind of a world at all
worth living in. You are temporarily
cut off more or less from the world
of dollars and cents, shillings and
pence. Here Huxley helps you in
extolling the sheer sense of joy in
thinking truer and straighter than
others, a kind of superiority which
does not mean conceit, the possession
of something which is denied the
man in the street. You redound
with original impulses and creative
energy, which must find expression
13

HUXLEY

somehow or somewhere; if not under
the prevailing incurrent, or 'centrip-
etal system' of academic instruction,
it must let itself out in extra-academic
activities, in your sports, your socie-
ties, your committees, your organiza-
tions, your dramatics, all good things
and having the highest educational
value in so far as they represent your
output, your outflow, your centrifugal
force.

You are, in fact, in a contest with
your intellectual environment outside
of these walls. Morally, according
to Ferrero, politically, according to
Bryce, and economically, according
to Carnegie, you are in the midst of
a ' triumphant democracy.' But in
the world of ideas such as sways Italy,
Germany, England, and in the high-
est degree France, you are in the
midst of a * triumphant mediocrity.'
14

AND EDUCATION

Paris is a city where ideas are at a
premium and money values count for
very little in public estimation. The
whole public waits breathless upon
the production of * Chanticleer.'
That Walhalla of French ambition,
' la Gloire,' may be reached by men
of ideas, but not by men of the marts.
Is it conceivable that the police of
New York should assemble to fight a
mob gathered to break up the opera
of a certain composer ? Is it con-
ceivable that you students should
crowd into this theatre to prevent a
speaker being heard, as those of the
Sorbonne did some years ago in the
case of Brunetiere ? If you should,
no one in this city would understand
you, and the authorities would be
called on promptly to interfere.

A fair measure of the culture of
your environment is the depth to
15

HUXLEY

which your morning paper prostitutes
itself for the dollar, its shades of yel-
lowness, its frivolity or its unscrupu-
lousness, or both. I sometimes think
it would be better not to read the
newspapers at all, even when they are
conscientious, because of their lack of
a sense of proportion, in the news
columns at least, of the really impor-
tant things in American life. Our
most serious evening mentor of stu-
dent manners and morals gives six
columns to a football game and six
lines to a great intercollegiate debate.
Such is the difference between precept
and practice. American laurels are
for the giant captain of industry ;
when his life is threatened or taken
away acres of beautiful forest are cut
down to procure the paper pulp nec-
essary to set forth his achievements,
while our greatest astronomer and
16

AND EDUCATION

mathematician passes away and per-
haps the pulp of a single tree will
suffice for the brief, inconspicuous
paragraphs which record his illness
and death.

Your British cousin is in a far more
favorable atmosphere, beginning with
his morning paper and ending with
the conversation of his seniors over
the evening cigar. As a Cambridge
man, having spent two years in Lon-
don and the university, I would not
describe the life so much as serious as
worth while. There are humor and
the pleasures of life in abundance, but
what is done, is done thoroughly well.
Contrast the comments of the British
and American press on such a light
subject as international polo ; the
former alone are well worth reading,
written by experts and adding some-
thing to our knowledge of the game.
17

HUXLEY

In the more novel subject of aviation
we look in vain in our press for any
solid information about construction.
Or take the practical subject of poli-
tics ; the British student finds every
great speech delivered in every part
of the Empire published in full in his
morning paper ; as an elector he gets
his evidence at first hand instead of
through the medium of the editor.

I believe the greatest fault of the
American student lies in the over-
development of one of his greatest
virtues, namely, his collectivism.
His strong esprit de corps patterns and
moulds him too far. The rewards
are for the * lock-step ' type of man
who conforms to the prevailing ideals
of his college. He must parade, he
must cheer, to order. Individualism
is at a discount ; it debars a man from
the social rewards of college life. In

18

AND EDUCATION

my last address to Columbia students
on the life of Darwin,1 I asked what
would be thought of that peculiar,
ungainly, beetle collector if he were
to enter one of our colleges to-day ?
He would be lampooned and laughed
out of the exercise of his preferences
and predispositions. The mother of
a very talented young honor man re-
cently confessed to me that she never
spoke of her son's rank because she
found it was considered "queer."
This is not what young America
generates, but what it borrows or re-
flects from the environment of its
elders.

Thus the young American is not

1 Life and Works of Darwin. Pop. Sci. Monthly,
Apr., 1909, pp. 315—340. (Address delivered at
Columbia University on the one hundredth anniver-
sary of Darwin's birth, as the first of a series of nine
lectures on "Charles Darwin and His Influence on
Science.")

19

HUXLEY

lifted up by the example of his sen-
iors, he has to lift it up. If he is a
student and has serious ambitions he
represents the young salt of his nation,
and the college brotherhood in gen-
eral is a light shining in the darkness.
Thus stumbling, groping, often mis-
led by his natural leaders, he does
somehow or other, through sheer
force, acquire an education, and is
just as surely coming to the front in
the leadership of the American nation
as the Oxford or Cambridge man is
leading the British nation.

Our student body is as fine as can
be, it represents the best blood and
the best impulses of the country ; but
there may be something wrong, some
loss, some delay, some misdirection of
educational energy.

Bad as the British university sys-
tem may be, and it has been vastly

20

AND EDUCATION

improved by the influence of Huxley,
it is more effective than ours because
more centrifugal. English lads are
taught to compose, even to speak in
Latin and Greek. The Greek play
is an anomaly here, it is an annual
affair at Cambridge. There are not
one but many active and successful
debating clubs in Cambridge.

The faults with our educational
design are to be discovered through
study of the lives of great men and
through one's own hard and stony
experience. The best text-books for
the nurture of the mind are these
very lives, and they are not found in
the lists of the pedagogues. Consult
your Froebel, if you will, but follow
the actual steps to Parnassus of the men
whose political, literary, scientific, or
professional career you expect to fol-
low. If you would be a missionary,

21

HUXLEY

take the lives of Patterson and Liv-
ingstone; if an engineer, 'The Lives
of Engineers ; ' if a physician, study
that of Pasteur, which I consider by
far the noblest scientific life of the
nineteenth century ; if you would be
a man of science, study the recently
published lives and letters of Darwin,
Spencer, Kelvin, and of our prototype
Huxley.

Here you may discover the secret
of greatness, which is, first, to be born
great, unfortunately a difficult and
often impossible task; second, to
possess the instinct of self -education.
You will find that every one of these
masters while more or less influenced
by their tutors and governors was led
far more by a sort of internal, instinc-
tive feeling that they must do certain
things and learn certain things. They
may fight the battle royal with par-

22

AND EDUCATION

ents, teachers, and professors, they
may be as rebellious as ducklings
amidst broods of chickens and give as
much concern to the mother fowls,
but without exception from a very
early age they do their own thinking
and revolt against having it done for
them, and they seek their own mode
of learning. The boy Kelvin is taken
to Germany by his father to study the
mathematics of Kelland ; he slips
down into the cellar to the French of
Fourier, and at the age of fifteen pub-
lishes his first paper to demonstrate
that Fourier is right and Kelland is
wrong. Pasteur's first research in
crystallography is so brilliant that his
professor urges him to devote himself
to this branch of science, but Pasteur
insists upon continuing for five years
longer his general studies in chemistry
and physics.

23

HUXLEY

This is the true empirical, or la-
boratory method of getting at the
trouble, if trouble there be in the
American modus operandi ; but a
generation of our great educators have
gone into the question as if no experi-
ments had ever been made. In the
last thirty years one has seen rise up a
series of * healers,' trying to locate the
supposed weakness in the American
student: one finds it in the classic
tongues and substitutes the modern ;
one in the required system and sub-
stitutes the elective ; one in the lack
of contact between teacher and stu-
dent and brings in preceptors, under
whom the patient shows a slight im-
provement. Now the kind of diag-
nosis which comes from examining
such a life as that of Huxley shows
that the real trouble lies in the pro-
longation to mature years of what may
24

AND EDUCATION

be styled the ' centripetal system,'
namely, that afferent, or inflowing
mediaeval and oriental kind of instruc-
tion in which the student is rarely if
ever forced to do his own thinking.

You will perceive by this that I
am altogether on your side, an insur-
gent in education, altogether against
most of my profession, altogether in
sympathy with the over-fed student,
and altogether against the prevailing
system of overfeeding, which stuffs,
crams, pours in, spoon-feeds, and as a
sort of deathbed repentance institutes
creative work after graduation.

How do you yourself stand on this
question ? Is your idea of a good
student that of a good ' receptacle ' ?
Do you regard your instructors as
useful grain hoppers whose duty it is
to gather kernels of wisdom from all
sources and direct them into your re-
25

HUXLEY

ceptive minds ? Are you content to
be a sort of psychic Sacculina, a vege-
tative animal, your mind a vast sack
with two systems, one for the incur-
rent, the other for the outcurrent of
predigested ideas ? If so, all your
mental organs of combat and locomo-
tion will atrophy. Do you put your
faith in reading, or in book know-
ledge ? If so, you should know that
not a five foot shelf of books, not even
the ardent reading of a fifty foot
shelf aided by prodigious memory will
give you that enviable thing called
culture, because the yardstick of this
precious quality is not what you take
in but what you give out, and this
from the subtle chemistry of your
brain must have passed through a
mental metabolism of your own so
that you have lent something to it.
To be a man of culture you need not
26

AND EDUCATION

be a man of creative power, because
such men are few, they are born not
made; but you must be a man of some
degree of centrifugal force, of indi-
viduality, of critical opinion, who
must make over what is read into
conversation and into life. Yes, one
little idea of your own well expressed
has a greater cultural value than one
hundred ideas you absorb; one page
that you produce, finely written, new
to science or to letters and really
worth reading, outweighs for your
own purposes the five foot shelf. On
graduation, presto, all changes, then
of necessity must your life be inde-
pendent and centrifugal ; and just in
so far as it has these powers will it be
successful ; just in so far as it is merely
imitative will it be a failure.

There is no revolution in the con-
trary, or outflowing design. Like all
27

HUXLEY

else in the world of thought it is, in
the germ at least, as old as the Greeks
and its illustrious pioneer was Socrates
(469—399 B. c.), who led the ap-
proach to truth not by laying down
the law himself but by means of an-
swers required of his students. The
efferent outflowing principle, more-
over, is in the program of the British
mathematician, Perry and many other
reformers to-day.

Against the centripetal theory of
acquiring culture Huxley revolted
with all his might. His daily train-
ing in the centrifugal school was in
the genesis of opinion ; and he in-
cessantly practiced the precept that
forming one's own opinion is infinitely
better than borrowing one. Our
sophisticated age discourages origin-
ality of view because of the plenitude
of a ready-made supply of editorials,
28

AND EDUCATION

of reviews, of reviews of reviews, of
critiques, comments, translations and
cribs. Study political speeches, not
editorials about them ; read original
debates, speeches, and reports. If
you purpose to be a naturalist get as
soon as you can at the objects them-
selves ; if you would be an artist, go
to your models ; if a writer, on the
same principle take your authors at
first hand, and, after you have wrestled
with the texts, and reached the full
length of your own fathom line, then
take the fathom line of the critic and
reviewer. Do not trust to mental
peptones. Carry the independent, in-
quisitive, skeptical and even rebellious
spirit of the graduate school well
down into undergraduate life, and
even into school life. If you are a
student force yourself to* think inde-
pendently ; if a teacher compel your
29

HUXLEY

youth to express their own minds.
In listening to a lecture weigh the
evidence as presented, cultivate a
polite skepticism, not affected but
genuine, keep a running fire of inter-
rogation marks in your mind, and
you will finally develop a mind of
your own. Do not climb that
mountain of learning in the hope
that when you reach the summit you
will be able to think for yourself;
think for yourself while you are
climbing.

In studying the lives of your great
men you will find certain of them
were veritable storehouses of facts,
but Darwin, the greatest of them all
in the last century, depended largely
upon his inveterate and voluminous
powers of note-taking. Thus you
may pray for the daily bread of real
mental growth, for the future paradise

3°

AND EDUCATION

is a state of mind and not a state of
memory. The line of thought is the
line of greatest resistance ; the line of
memory is the line of least resistance ;
in itself it is purely imitative, like the
gold or silver electroplating process
which lends a superficial coating of
brilliancy or polish to what may be a
shallow mind.

The case is deliberately overstated
to give it emphasis.

True, the accumulated knowledge
of what has been thought and said,
serves as the gravity law which will
keep you from flying off at a tangent.
But no warning signals are needed,
there is not the least danger that con-
structive thinking will drive you away
from learning; it will much more
surely drive you to it, with a deeply
intensified reverence for your intellec-
tual forebears ; in fact, the eldest off-

31

HUXLEY

spring of centrifugal education is that
keen and fresh appetite for knowledge
which springs only from trying to add
your own mite to it. How your
Maxwell, Herz, Rontgen, Curie, with
their world-invigorating discoveries
among the laws of radiant matter, be-
gin to soar in your estimation when
you yourself wrest one single new
fact from the reluctant world of
atoms ! How your modern poets,
Maeterlinck and Rostand, take on the
air of inspiration when you would
add a line of prose verse to what they
are delving for in this mysterious
human faculty of ours. Regard Vol-
taire at the age of ten in * Louis-le-
Grand,' the Eton of France, already
producing bad verses, but with a pas-
sionate voracity for poetry and the
drama. Regard the youthful Huxley
returning from his voyage of the
32

AND EDUCATION

Rattlesnake' and laying out for
himself a ten years' course in search
of pure information.

This route of your own to opinions,
ideas, and the discovery of new facts
or principles brings you back again to
Huxley as the man who always had
something of his own to say and
labored to say it in such a way as to
force people to listen to him. His
wondrous style did not come easily
to him; he himself told me it cost
him years of effort, and I consider his
advice about style far wiser than that
of Herbert Spencer. Why forego
pleasures, turn your back on the
world, the flesh, and the devil, and
devote your life to erudition, ob-
servation, and the pen if you remain
unimpressive, if you cannot get an
audience, if no one cares to read what
you write ? This moral is one of the

33

HUXLEY

first that Huxley has impressed upon
you, namely, write to be read; if
necessary "stoop to conquer," employ
all your arts and wiles to get an audi-
ence in science, in literature, in the
arts, in politics. Get an audience you
must, otherwise you will be a cipher
and not a force.

Pursuant of the constructive design,
the measure of the teacher's success is
the degree in which ideas come not
from him but from his pupils. A
brilliant address may produce a tem-
porary emotion of admiration, a dry
lecture may produce a permanent
productive impulse in the hearers.
One may compare some who are pop-
ularly known as gifted teachers to
expert swimmers who sit on the bank
and talk inspiringly on analyses of
strokes ; the centrifugal teacher takes
the pupils into the water with him,
34

AND EDUCATION

he may even pretend to drown and
call for a rescue. In football par-
lance the coach must get into the
scrimmage with the team. This was
the lesson taught me by the great
embryologist Francis Balfour of Cam-
bridge, who was singularly noted for
doing joint papers with his men. An
experiment I have tried with marked
success in order to cultivate centrifu-
gal power and expression at the same
time is to get out of the lecture chair
and make my students in turn lecture
to me. This is virtually the famous
method of teaching law re-discovered
by the educational genius of Langdell;
the students do all the lecturing and
discoursing, the professor lolls quietly
in his chair and makes his comments ;
the stimulus upon ambition and com-
petition is fairly magical ; there is in
the classroom the real intellectual
35

HUXLEY

struggle for existence which one
meets in the world of affairs. I would
apply this very Socratic principle in
every branch of instruction, early and
late, and thus obey the ' acceleration '
law in education which I have spoken
of above as bringing into earlier and
earlier stages those powers which are
to be actually of service in after life.
There is then no mystery about
education if we plan it along the ac-
tual lines of self-development fol-
lowed by these great leaders and shape
its deep under-current principles after
our own needs and experience. Look
early at the desired goal and work
toward it from the very beginning.
The proof that the secret does not lie
in subject, or language, but in prepa-
ration for the living productive prin-
ciple is found in the fact that there
have been relatively educated men in
36

AND EDUCATION

every stage of history. The wall
painters in the Magdalenian caves were
the producers and hence the educated
men of their day. This goal of pro-
duction was sought even earlier by the
leaders of Eolithic men 200,000 years
ago and is equally magnetic for the
men of dirigible balloons and aero-
planes of our day. It is, to follow in
mind-culture the principle of addition
and accretion characteristic of all liv-
ing things, namely, to develop the
highest degree of productive power,
centrifugal force, original, creative,
individual efficiency. Through this
the world advances ; the Neolithic
man with his invention of polished
implements succeeds the Palaeolithic,
and the man of books and printing
replaces the savage.

The standards of a liberal mind are
and always have been the same,
37

HUXLEY

namely, the sense of Truth and Beauty,
both of which are again in con-
formity with Nature.

" Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
KEATS' Ode on a Grecian Urn.

The sources of our facts are and
always have been the same, namely,
the learning of what men before you
have observed and recorded, and the
advance only through the observation
of new truth, that is, old to nature
but new to man. The handling of
this knowledge has always been the
same, namely, through human reason.
The giving forth of this knowledge
and thus the furthering of ideas and
customs has and always will be the
same, namely, through expression,
vocal, written, or manual, that is, in
symbols and in design.

It follows that the all round liber-
38

AND EDUCATION

ally educated man, from Palaeolithic
times to the time when the earth
shall become a cold cinder, will al-
ways be the same, namely, the man
who follows his standards of truth and
beauty, who employs his learning and
observation, his reason, his expression,
for purposes of production, that is, to
add something of his own to the stock
of the world' s ideas. This is the
author's conception of a liberal edu-
cation.

One cannot too often quote the
rugged insistence of Carlyle : " Pro-
duce ! Produce ! Were it but the
pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a
product, produce it in God's name !
'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee:
out with it, then."

Now note that whereas there are
the above six powers, namely, truth
and beauty, learning and observation,
39

HUXLEY

reason, and expression, which subserve
the seventh, production or constructive
thinking, and whereas the giving out
of ideas is the object to be attained,
only one power figures prominently
in our modern system of college and
school education, namely, the learning
of facts and the memory thereof. It
is no exaggeration to say that this
makes up 95% of modern education.
Who are the meteors of school and
college days ? For the most part those
with precocious or well trained mem-
ories. Why do so many of these
meteors flash out of existence at grad-
uation ? The answer is simple if you
accept my conception of education.
Whereas it takes six powers to make
a liberally educated man or woman,
and seven to make a productive man
or woman, only one power has been
cultivated assiduously in the ' centrip-
40

AND EDUCATION

etal ' education ; whereas there are
two great gateways of knowledge,
learning and observation, only one has
been continuously passed through;
whereas there are two universal stand-
ards of truth and beauty, only truth has
constantly been held up to you, and
that in precept rather than in practice.
For nothing is surer than this, that
the sense of truth must come as a
daily personal experience in the life
of the student through testing values
for himself, as it does in the life of
the scientist, the artist, the physi-
cian, the engineer, the merchant.
Note that whereas you are powerless
unless you can by the metabolism of
logic make the sum of acquired and
observed knowledge your own, that
kind of work-a-day efficient logic has
never been forced upon you and you
are daily, perhaps hourly, guilty of
41

HUXLEY

the non sequitur, the post hoc ergo
propter hocy the 'undistributed middle,'
and all those innocent sins against
truth which come through the il-
logical mind.

" That man,'* says Huxley, " has
had a liberal education . . . whose
intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine,
with all its parts of equal strength,
and in smooth working order ; ready,
like a steam-engine, to be turned to
any kind of work, and spin the gos-
samers as well as forge the anchors of
the mind."

Note that whereas you are a useless
member of society unless you can give
forth something of what you know
and feel in writing, speaking, or de-
sign, your expressive powers may have
been atrophied through insufficient
use. In brief, you may have shunned
individual opinion, observation, logic,
expression, because they are each and
42

AND EDUCATION
every one on the lines of greatest re-
sistance. And your teachers not only
allowed you but actually encouraged
and rewarded you for following the
lines of least resistance in the accu-
rate reproduction, in examination
papers and marking systems, of
their own ideas and those you found
in books.

May you, therefore, write down
these seven words and read them over
every morning : Truth, Beauty, Learn-
ing, Observation, Reason, Expres-
sion, Production.

In the wondrous old quilt work of
inherited, or ancestral predispositions
which make your being you may be
gifted with all these seven powers in
equal and well balanced degree; if
you are so blessed you have a great
career before you. If, as is more
likely, you have in full measure only
a part of each, or some in large meas-

43

HUXLEY

ure, some in small, keep on the daily
examination of your chart as giving
you the canons of a liberal education
and of a productive mind.

Remember that as regards the some-
what overworked word 'service' every
addition in every conceivable depart-
ment of human activity which is con-
structive of society is service ; that the
spirit of science is to transfer some-
thing of value from the unknown into
the realm of the known, and is, there-
fore, identical with the spirit of litera-
ture; that the moral test of every
advance is whether or not it is con-
structive, for whatever is constructive
is moral.

I would not for a moment take
advantage of the present opportunity
to discourage the study of human na-
ture and of the humanities, but for
what is called the best opening for a
constructive career let it be Nature.
44

AND EDUCATION

The ground for my preference is
that human nature is an exhaustible
fountain of research ; Homer under-
stood it well; Solomon fathomed it;
Shakespeare divined it, both normal
and abnormal; the modernists have
been squeezing out the last drops of
abnormality.

Nature, studied since Aristotle's
time, is still full to the brim; no
perceptible falling of its tides is
evident from any point at which it is
attacked, from nebula? to protoplasm;
it is always wholesome, refreshing, and
invigorating. Of the two creative
literary artists of our time, Maeter-
linck, jaded with human abnormality,
comes back to the bee and the flowers
and the 'blue bird,' with a delicious
renewal of youth, while Rostand turns
to the barnyard.

45

DATE DUE

UC1 JU

L * » 1969

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61976

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CAYLORD

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3 1970 00053 7487

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